Family 3 of the developer journey — "things that move independently of the background." Sprites (OBJ) are the heart of any game: the player, enemies, bullets, pickups. The SNES gives you 128 hardware sprites; this family is a ladder from one static sprite up to streaming a multi-tile character every frame.

The ladder

Rung	Example	Developer question
3.1	simple_sprite	How do I put one sprite on screen?
3.2	sprite_sizes	How do I use the six OBJ size modes (8×8…64×64)?
3.3	animated_sprite	How do I frame-animate a sprite (+H-flip)?
3.4	metasprite	How do I compose one character from many tiles?
3.5	dynamic_sprite	How do I stream sprite tiles into VRAM per frame?
3.6	dynamic_metasprite	How do I stream a multi-tile character (dynamic + meta)?
3.7	sprite_swarm	How many sprites can I actually move at 60 fps, and why?

3.7 is the showcase and a reality check: a smooth 32-sprite swarm plus the honest per-sprite budget (the base CPU tops out around three dozen in C — see chips/sa1_starfield for 128 via the SA-1).

Start at 3.1 and climb: each rung adds exactly one idea onto the last.

Reference — OAM in one screen

OAM structure — 128 sprites, 4 bytes each in the low table (512 bytes): X (low 8), Y, tile number (low 8), attributes (vhoopppc — flip, priority, palette, tile high bit). The high table (32 bytes) holds 2 bits/sprite: X high bit and size select.

Sizes (OBJSEL $2101) — each value picks a small/*large* pair, e.g. 1 = 8×8 / 32×32, 5 = 32×32 / 64×64. Rung 3.2 walks all six.

Many sprites per frame — write straight to the oamMemory[] buffer rather than calling oamSet() repeatedly; the NMI handler DMAs the buffer to OAM hardware when oam_update_flag is set. Rungs 3.5–3.6 build on this.

Animated Sprite -- Direction States and Sprite Sheets Dynamic Metasprite Engine Dynamic Sprite -- VRAM Streaming for Animated Sprites Metasprite Simple Sprite -- Your First OAM Sprite Object Size -- All 6 SNES Sprite Size Modes sprite_swarm — a bouncing swarm, and the OAM throughput ceiling