Sprite (computer graphics)  In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional bitmap that is integrated into a larger scene, most often in a 2D video game. The term was first used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s. Originally sprites referred to fixed-sized objects composited together, by hardware, with a background. This composition occurs as each scan line is prepared for the video output device, such as a CRT, without involvement of the main CPU and without the need for a full-screen frame buffer. Sprites can be positioned or altered by setting attributes used during the hardware composition process. Systems with hardware sprites include the TI-99/4A (1979), Atari 8-bit family (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), Nintendo Famicom / NES (1983), Amiga (1985), Sega Mega-Drive / Genesis (1988), and many coin-operated arcade machines of the 1980s. Sprite hardware varies in how many sprites are supported, how many can be displayed on a single scan line (which is often a lower number), the dimensions and colors of each sprite, and special effects such as scaling or reporting pixel-precise overlap. Use of the term "sprite" has expanded to refer to any two-dimensional bitmap used as part of a graphics display, even if drawn into a frame buffer (by either software or a GPU) instead of being composited on-the-fly at display time. The use of sprites originated with arcade games. The first video game to represent player characters as human player images was Taito's "Basketball", which was licensed in February 1974 to Midway, releasing it as "TV Basketball" in North America. Signetics devised the first chips capable of generating sprite graphics (referred to as "objects" by Signetics) for home systems. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1978 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System and later in the 1979 Elektor TV Games Computer. The Atari VCS, released in 1977, features a hardware sprite implementation where five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The term "sprite" was not in use at the time. The VCS's sprites are called "movable objects" in the programming manual, further identified as two "players", two "missiles", and one "ball". These each consist of a single row of pixels that are displayed on a scan line. To produce a two-dimensional shape, the sprite's single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scan line to the next.