Atari - 2600 (Tia)¶
Background¶
Tia is an Atari 2600 core written from scratch in C89 - not a port of another emulator. It emulates the 6507 CPU, the TIA and the 6532 RIOT cycle-accurately, detects NTSC or PAL from the game's scanline count, and supports the common cartridge mappers: 2K/4K, F8/F6/F4 with SuperChip RAM, 3F, E0, FE, FA, E7, F0, UA, DPC (Pitfall II) and the Supercharger (AR). DPC+, CDF/CDFJ and BUS cartridges are not supported yet.
The Tia core has been authored by
- Eric Warmenhoven
The Tia core is licensed under
A summary of the licenses behind RetroArch and its cores can be found here.
Extensions¶
Content that can be loaded by the Tia core have the following file extensions:
- .a26
- .bin
RetroArch database(s) that are associated with the Tia core:
Features¶
Frontend-level settings or features that the Tia core respects.
| Feature | Supported |
|---|---|
| Restart | ✔ |
| Screenshots | ✔ |
| Saves | ✕ |
| States | ✔ |
| Rewind | ✔ |
| Netplay | ✔ |
| Core Options | ✔ |
| Memory Monitoring (achievements) | ✔ |
| RetroArch Cheats | ✕ |
| Native Cheats | ✕ |
| Controls | ✔ |
| Remapping | ✔ |
| Multi-Mouse | ✕ |
| Rumble | ✕ |
| Sensors | ✕ |
| Camera | ✕ |
| Location | ✕ |
| Subsystem | ✕ |
| Softpatching | ✕ |
| Disk Control | ✕ |
| Username | ✕ |
| Language | ✕ |
| Crop Overscan | ✕ |
| LEDs | ✕ |
Core options¶
The Tia core has the following option(s) that can be tweaked from the core options menu. The default setting is bolded.
- Region [tia_region] (Auto|NTSC|PAL|PAL60|SECAM)
- Palette [tia_palette] (Standard|z26)
- Left Difficulty (initial) [tia_left_diff] (A|B)
- Right Difficulty (initial) [tia_right_diff] (A|B)
- TV Type (initial) [tia_color] (Color|Black & White)
- Power-on RAM [tia_ram_init] (Hardware-like|Zeroed)
- Audio DC blocking (high-pass) [tia_dc_block] (On|Off)
- Crop horizontal overscan [tia_crop_hoverscan] (Off|On)
- Crop vertical overscan (rows) [tia_crop_voverscan] (0|2|4|6|8|10|12|14|16|18|20|22|24)
- Paddle sensitivity [tia_paddle_sensitivity] (1|2|3|4|5 (default)|6|7|8|9|10)
- Paddle deadzone (%) [tia_paddle_deadzone] (0% (off)|5%|10%|15%|20%|25%|30%)
Controllers¶
Each port can be a Joystick, Paddles (two per port, on the analog stick), Driving (the Indy 500 controller) or Keypad (the 12-key controller), set in Controls > Port N Controls > Device Type. The difficulty and TV-type options only set the switches' starting positions; the buttons below toggle them while a game runs.
Joypad¶
| RetroPad Inputs | Tia |
|---|---|
 |
Up |
 |
Down |
 |
Left |
 |
Right |
 |
Fire |
 |
Select |
 |
Reset |
 |
Left Difficulty A |
 |
Left Difficulty B |
 |
Right Difficulty A |
 |
Right Difficulty B |
 |
Color |
 |
Black/White |