The word "Sprite" originally referred to fairies or spirits. Within games, a sprite is a 2D object that can move independently from the background. Your mouse cursor is a sprite.
It was obvious to me that "Space Invaders" did not have hardware sprites, because it moved the invaders one at a time instead of moving them all at once. This led to a reportedly unintentional bug that became a feature; as invaders were eliminated, the remaining invaders moved faster because there were fewer objects to move.
Two computers that I wrote games for in the 1980s did not have hardware sprites. This puts the game at a disadvantage because the code has to draw objects to the screen, which is technically difficult and burdens the CPU. This limits what an 8-bit computer without hardware sprites can do.
I wrote software to emulate hardware sprites on the Atari ST. Since it was a 16-bit computer, the extra computer power made this task easier. Once computers and game systems reached 32-bit, they usually didn't bother to include hardware sprites because the processors were powerful enough to draw anything they wanted to the screen.
