Sprite (computer Graphics) - History

History

The use of read-only memory in arcade games from around 1974 allowed the widespread use of sprites. Taito released some of the earliest known video games with sprites that year, including Basketball, a sports game that represented four basketball players and two baskets as sprite images, and Speed Race, a racing video game that represented cars as sprite images, which could collide with each other and vertically scroll across a race track. The following year, they released Western Gun, a run and gun multi-directional shooter that was the earliest known video game to visually represent game characters as sprites, as well as the first to depict a gun on screen.

In the mid-1970s, Signetics devised the first video/graphics processors capable of generating sprite graphics. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1976 Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System.

The Atari VCS, released in 1977, features a hardware sprite implementation wherein five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The VCS's sprites, called players and missiles, are constructed from a single row of pixels that displayed on a scan line; to produce a two-dimensional shape, the sprite's single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scanline to the next.

The Atari 400 and 800 home computers of 1979 feature similar, but more elaborate circuitry, capable of moving eight Player/Missile objects per scanline -- four 8-bit wide players, and four 2-bit wide missiles. This more advanced version allows operation like the VCS where the CPU modifies the graphics pattern register for each scan line, or an automatic mode where the display chip performs DMA from a table in memory populating the graphics pattern registers for each scan line. In the automatic DMA mode vertical motion is simulated by moving the sprite's up and down incrementally in memory. The hardware produces a two-dimensional bitmap several pixels wide, and as tall as the screen. The width of pixels can also vary from 1, 2, or 4 color clocks. Multiple Player objects can be merged to produce a multi-color player. The four missile objects can be grouped together as a fifth Player and colored independently from the Players.

The Elektor TV Games Computer was an early microcomputer capable of generating sprite graphics, which Signetics referred to as "objects".

The term sprite (from the Latin spiritus, "soul" or "vigor") was first used in the graphic sense by one of the definers of the Texas Instruments 9918(A) video display processor (VDP). By this time, sprites had advanced to the point where complete two-dimensional shapes could be moved around the screen horizontally and vertically with minimal software overhead.

The CPU would instruct the external chips to fetch source images and integrate them into the main screen using direct memory access channels. Calling up external hardware, instead of using the processor alone, greatly improved graphics performance. Because the processor was not occupied by the simple task of transferring data from one place to another, software could run faster; and because the hardware provided certain innate abilities, programs were also smaller.