Sprites: things that move without the screen moving

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Everything drawn on this machine was in a cell. Something between two
cells meant rewriting both; something moving a pixel at a time meant
rewriting them sixty times a second, which is affordable for one thing
and not for twenty. A sprite is put at a pixel and the device draws it
over whatever is behind, so moving it costs two bytes.

MADE OF TILES, which is the decision the rest follows from: m by n taken
in reading order from one index, so there is no second pixel format, no
second kind of memory, and nothing a sprite can show that the map cannot.
A 16 by 16 character is four tiles and the background can name the same
four.

256 entries of 8 bytes at 0xC000 in the atlas - eight so the entry
address is a shift, the same no-multiply argument as the palette's four.
Position is signed and sixteen bits, because 640 by 400 does not fit in a
byte and a sprite has to be able to sit half off the left rather than
appearing whole at the edge.

A PIXEL OF ZERO IS NOT DRAWN, or every sprite is a rectangle. Tested
before the attribute is added, so a hole belongs to the art and not to
the colour scheme. The same rule the other way round is what "behind"
means: drawn only where the background pixel was zero, so a thing walks
behind a pillar and in front of the floor in one frame.

All of them draw, every frame, so they cannot flicker. Real machines
dropped them per scanline because they had a fixed number of shift
registers; this has a loop. The limit is the size of the table, which is
a constant rather than a property of what is on screen.

And the system takes them down at exit. The sprite table sits in the gap
the screen save walks around - to the end of the map, then the palette -
and that is right, because nothing the shell draws is a sprite: there is
nothing to give back, only something to take away. Otherwise a program
that put a ball up and left would leave it over the prompt, in front of
everything, with nothing able to type it away. Sprite.asm deliberately
leaves its own, because a program that faulted could not have cleared it.

Every check here was re-broken and failed: transparency, reading order,
draw order, priority, and size. Size needed breaking twice - the first
attempt did not compile, and a silent build failure had left the old
binary passing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW

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This commit is contained in:

Anachronaut

2026-09-02 11:42:11 -04:00

co-authored by Claude Opus 5

parent eee95ef0ce

commit a916103a7f

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Tests/input/cosmosSprite.keys

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