Sprites on the Amiga are hardware-generated graphical objects controlled by the custom chips (Denise/Alice) that overlay the playfield graphics without CPU intervention. The original chip set supports eight hardware sprites (0-7), each 16 pixels wide with arbitrary height and four colors (three visible plus one transparent), which can be attached in pairs to create sprites with 16 colors (15 visible plus transparent). Sprite 0 is reserved for the system mouse pointer, while the remaining sprites are fetched automatically via DMA from Chip RAM and positioned independently of the bitplanes, making them ideal for game objects and cursors.