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From: barnettj@pookie.crd.ge.com (Janet A Barnett)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer,comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Animation Speed & Redraw
Message-ID: <12033@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 19 Sep 90 22:03:46 GMT
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Organization: General Electric Corporate R&D Center
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I'll add my extra bit of misinformation here: You can only get 15 colors with
attached sprites if the sprites in a particular pair lie on top of each other.
Therefore, with 4 pairs of sprites, the maximum 15 color sprite can be only
64 pixels wide.  Of course, a sprite pair does not have to completely
overlap, but only the overlapping portions will be in 15 color mode; the
unoverlapped (sp?) portions will display the 3 colors that the pair usually
display.

Now, here's the interesting part.  If you read the Hardware manual closely,
you will see that the sprite data registers can be reloaded by the COPPER or
the CPU at any time.  This can allow you to have sprites of almost arbitrary
width, at the cost of reloading the sprite registers manually during the 
course of the screen display.  The only limitation is that there have to be
sufficient CPU cycles available during display time to load the sprite data
registers.  For instance, it won't work on a 16 color HIRES screen.  This
is an interesting hack to try with user copperlists, and the relatively
unused COPPER SKIP instruction.