Used to do a similar thing with old Archimedes games (the first computer to use an ARM chip, in 1988). The original ARM had 16 x 32 bit registers, and a single

Used to do a similar thing with old Archimedes games (the first computer to use an ARM chip, in 1988). The original ARM had 16 x 32 bit registers, and a single assembler command could write some or all of them to memory in one go. In practice you could use about 12 of the registers for graphics data (the others being program counters and stack pointers etc). Each pixel was 2 bytes, so with 12 registers you could do 1 row of 24 pixels - all in one instruction. Fetch some new data into the registers and write them again 24 times and you had a 24x24 sprite drawn very fast. To really use this technique you had to draw at word boundaries, thus the movement had to be 4 pixels per frame. But you could do a good full-screen scroll with this at around 12-15 fps (Archimedes could also do double-buffered screen memory so you draw one while displaying the other) and still plenty of time to do all the other work for each frame.