Commodore Amiga A500 Technical Reference Manual page 204

E-SPRITES (EIGHT (8)
There are eight independent Sprite
CHANNELS)
controllers, each with its own DMA
channel and its own dedicated time slot
for DMA data transfer. Sprites are line
buffered objects that can move very fast
because of their position are controlled
by hardware registers and compacitors.
Each Sprite has two 1 6 bit data
registers that define a 1 6 pixel wide
Sprite with four colors. Each has a
horizontal position register, a vertical
start position register and a vertical stop
position register. This allows variable
vertical size sprites.
The Sprite DMA controller fetches
image and position data automatically
from anywhere in 51 2K of memory.
Sprites can be run automatically in DMA
mode or they can be loaded and
controlled by the microprocessor.
Each Sprite can be reused vertically as
often as desired. Horizontal reusing is
also possible with microprocessor
control.
F-DISK (ONE (1) CHANNEL)
The disk controller, which is located
outside of the DMA controller, uses a
single DMA channel from the device. The
controller uses this DMA time slot for
data transfer and can read or write a
block of data up to 128K anywhere in
51 2K of memory.
G-MEMORY REFRESH (ONE
The refresh controller uses a single DMA
(1 ) CHANNEL)
channel with its own time slots. It places
RAS addresses on the memory address
bus (MAS) during these slots, in order to
refresh the dynamic RAM. Memory is
refreshed on every roster line.
During the DMA no data transfer
actually takes place. The register
address bus (RGA) is used to supply
video synchronizing codes. At this time,
RASO* and RASl* are low and CASU*
and CASL* are inactive.