On Saturday, June 8, 2019 at 4:45:03 PM UTC-4, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> I was recently playing Summer Games by Epyx on the Commodore 64 (well in
> an emulator). I noticed again the smooth animation of the guy with the
> torch lightning the Olympic Fire. I was stunned back in 1984 when I saw
> it on the real machine.
> 
> Only today I notice that the guy, the fire and eight doves were on the
> screen at the same time at some point. I would imagine these are all
> sprites. But the C64 only had eight hardware sprites. But with eight
> doves, the torch carrier and possibly the flame after being ignited I
> count at least ten sprite. How did they pull it off?
> -- 
> Andreas
> 
> My random thoughts and comments
> https://news-commentaries.blogspot.com/

As long as the doves stay in the sky and the fire stays OUT of the sky and
away from the ground, they might have used vertical interrupts to switch
sprite sets as the electron beam hit certain parts of the screen. Think of
it like a layer cake. Each 
layer can have up to eight sprites which are independent of the sprites in
any other layer. On the 64, the layers can be different widths. You can
have dozens of sprites on the screen at the same time but each group of
eight can only stay in its own 
layer.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05