In most computer systems of the era, the CPU was used to create graphics by drawing bit patterns directly into memory. Separate hardware then reads these patterns and produces the actual video signal for the display. The Mindset was designed by ex-Atari engineers and added a new custom-designed VLSI vector processor to handle many common drawing tasks, like lines or filling areas. Instead of the CPU doing all of this work by changing memory directly, in the Mindset the CPU would simply set up those instructions and then hand off the actual bit fiddling to the separate processor.