Sprite Flicker Question

[MayDay]

I had a question about sprites and flicker- I wasn't sure if there is a more advanced way to program a sprite so that it appears more than once in the same scanline without flickering? The application would be to create two players that both use both sprites. I wasn't sure if there is some clever programming technique such as repositioning the sprite mid-scanline so thats its used again without flickering? Any other theories on how to accomplish this?

[eshu]

I noticed you posted a lovely mockup of a Mortal Kombat game in another thread so I'm guessing you're talking about that?

 

I'm pretty sure the setup you have there would be impossible without flicker.

 

There are a few tricky ways to re-use sprites, but none of them give you complete control. I'm struggling to put together a good description of what you can do with the "RESP trick" but it's really not practical for moving full size sprites around etc... also I don't think it's very practical to use with double size sprites (I think maybe if you change from single width to double width at just the right time it might work? but it would be a lot of overhead).

 

I've thought before it might be possible (but tricky) to use a similar setup to that which I used in http://atariage.com/forums/topic/195210-very-early-wip-of-something-ive-been-working-on-for-ages/for a beat-em-up - that uses a player and ball/missile for each player. You could use for instance P0 and BL for player 1 and P1 and M0 for player 2 - but you'd need to be able to change COLUP0 (The colour of P0/M0) at any given cycle and ensure that P0 and M0 were always at least 3 pixels apart......you could use double size players this way......

[MayDay]

Yes, I was asking in regard to the Mortal Kombat mockup I did. If one could make the sprites look good, I think a beat-em-up could be one of the nicest looking 2600 games as the background could be mostly or entirely static. Since little to no resources for the ball/missiles were needed (and the playfield could be static (at least where the players would be) I thought there might be enough resources for some fancy programming. Thanks for the clarification, and that RPG screenshot is amazing.