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

[Steve Bjork]

George,

Sprites are small graphic images that are display over the background 
graphic image. (Such as space ship, jumping men and anything else that 
moves around independent of the background image.)  On most sprite system, 
you just load up the sprite memory with the image and tell it where it 
should be placed and then the hardware displays the image over the background.

In the case of a standard bit map display (like the coco) the image must be 
drawn on the background and then removed every game frame.  This drawing 
and removing is about 50% of the work in most CoCo games.

Every game system from the Atari 2600 to Super NES used sprites to speed up 
their game graphics.

Steve


At 07:45 PM 4/22/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>I know little of programming except in basic, Basic-09 being my favorite,
>
>Forgive my ignorance...
>
>What's a sprite?
>
>George