Memblers wrote:
Atari 2600 had 2 sprites
Which could be replicated horizontally by a factor of 2 or 3, with the pattern changed by tightly timed code. (It was easier to pull this off than it might sound to NES veterans; a write to one of the registers would halt the CPU until hblank as a side effect, and there wasn't any pesky fraction-of-a-cycle at the end of a line.) A
lot of title screens were 3 pairs of replicated sprites. Video Chess used 2 pairs of replicated sprites to draw 4 chess pieces and then flickered them with odd lines of odd sprites and even lines of even sprites in one field and vice versa in the other. (Incidentally, development versions of Video Chess were larger than the 2600's standard 4 KiB ROM window and thus prompted the invention of mappers.)
Quote:
and many games flickered the sprites to put more on screen. But they had the advantage of older TVs having more phosphor persistance
That and no 5-line delay for rewriting OAM, so the 8x1-pixel sprites could be multiplexed up and down as much as they wanted.
But you're right that black-and-white TV phosphors would generally persist more than those of color TVs. In fact, red persisted so long, even in the Super NES era, that Nintendo made the Super Scope insensitive to red light, instead requiring games to have a slight cyan cast over the entire screen.