How long do you have to wait to become a "Scratcher" instead of a "New Scratcher"?
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Yeah, I'm still waiting in the TBG forums to become a Member...
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dips4u wrote:
i wanted to know why the object is called as sprite??? why sprite???
It's an old computer term
You should make your own topic to ask questions
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Called a "sprite" because they can be moved over the screen without affecting the stuff behind them in a kind of ethereal or ghostly way - back in the 70's and 80's this was ground breaking stuff!
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Sorry to continue the off-topic conversation but...
Someone at Texas Instruments apparently coined the term "sprite." They came up with it while developing the TMS9918 VDP. (The 9918A is the chip that the TI Home Computer and the Colecovision used. The 8-bit NES used a descendent of that chip. This information comes from someone on that chip's design team.) It should be noted that the actual sprite hardware technology was invented in the mid-1970s by Signetics. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1976 Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System (not a pc btw.)
Interestingly, it originally referred to a hardware method needed to generate images due to low processing power. As processing got faster, the hardware method was no longer needed and programmers began referring to the images themselves as sprites.
Who named it "sprite" and why, I dunno. But I did find the phone number for a man who was on the chip development team but I didn't call him to ask, sorry. Maybe I just just prefer to imagine some engineers in lab celebrating their achievement with icy cold soft-drinks when someone said "Hey, what are we gonna call the thing?"
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Again, I look up to you Locomule
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