[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: What are "sprites"?

[James the Animal Tamer]

It's a smaller bitmap that's independent of its background, through 
hardware.  I think the term was coined by Texas Instruments for its 
TMS9918 line of graphic display chips.

The term was borrowed by people who wrote about the Commodore 64 
(Commodore called them "Moveable Object Blocks) and the Atari home 
computers (Atari called them "Player-Missile Graphics" -- but these 
might not really be sprites, since there was no vertical position 
register)).


The term has been abused by people referring to graphics that are part 
of the background, but, since the background is restored and the small 
bitmaps are re-blitted with each video frame, they appear to be sprites 
even though they're not.

> 
> What's a sprite?






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