VIC-II

VIC-II (the MOS 6567 for NTSC, 6569 for PAL) drew the picture inside the Commodore 64. Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble designed it in 1982: sixteen fixed colours, a 40×25 text grid, a 320×200 bitmap, and eight hardware sprites floating freely over the background. Alongside it sat SID, handling the sound.

The chip's real legacy is what demo coders wrung out of it. By reading the raster position and firing interrupts on exactly the right line, they could change colour, palette and sprite registers mid-frame — more than eight sprites at once, side borders opened for overscan, raster bars. The price was the notorious bad line, where the chip stole cycles from the processor. The Amiga's Copper would later do the same thing declaratively.