Hi Dave,
IIRC, the original Psygnosis documentation used the term sprites. While, yes, sprites were normally limited to 4 colours, the could be made to do more - which is why I mentioned that they suffer from a lot of abuse. First of all, two sprites could be stacked to make a 16 colour sprite. Additionally, if the copper were interrupted in the middle of a scanline, it could be possible to refresh the sprites (so long as additional DMAs weren't needed). So, for example, a bullet, which used the same image, could be repeated an unlimited number of times. The player ship, and most enemy units and shots were all sprites - I think only the background was blitter driven (and then, only a little - it mostly used playfields and offset scrolling).
This can be demonstrated in World 2. About 2-3 minutes in, theres a part with a dozen-or-so crawly things that attack you. Not only does the frame-rate drop (on my NTSC Amiga anyway), but some of the badguys vanish altogether - a symptom of sprite behaviour. Slow down on BOB run games just slows down. My Adspeed solved the slowdowns wonderfully.
edit - checked the original requirements for Fellow (which the full source code is available for). Processor wise, a 133-150Mhz Pentium was enough for Amiga500 speeds and needed 11MB of RAM to run minimally (that's 256KB ChipRAM). Fellow wasn't perfect, didn't do cycle-exact emulation by far, and had some CPU core bugs. If code denisty can increase substantially from the x86 code, it might be possible... maybe
-- nonarKitten
DaveC posted on Dec 30 2004 at 09:26 PM said:
nonarKitten, are you sure that the "sprites" in blood money were actually sprites? Couldn't those have been BObs (Blitter Objects)? I thought the Amiga sprite hardware only allowed 4 colors per sprite.
... and make the living room TV look... well messy 
