Is it possible to have more than 8 sprites in a rasterline on a real Commodore 64 (not on an emulator)? the sprites don't need to be different.
2 Answers
Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, but there are some caveats:
VICII (the video chip) reads in 3 bytes of sprite data per rasterfor each of the maximum 8 hardware sprite, and the buffered data is meant to be displayed on the next raster.
If you display a hardware sprite a second time on a given raster that buffer will be empty the next raster, so on the following raster you'll end up with a transparent stripe in the sprite.
Also the sprite data fetches happen at around the end of the current raster/start of the next one, so you are pretty much limited to duplicate sprite #0 (because its data is fetched first), and even then the CRT-beam is so far on the right of the screen that you'd have to remove the sideborder to able to see the duplicate sprite visible.
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