Palette Animation
Graphics technique where color palettes rotate rapidly, creating the illusion of motion without moving any pixels.
On hardware with a fixed color palette—like the Commodore 64's 16-color mode—palette animation was visual magic on a budget. Keep the bitmap unchanged but rapidly cycle which colors indices 0, 1, 2 represent. Fire effects ripple and shimmer. Shimmering water surfaces appear to flow. The effect runs in microseconds with zero CPU cost, making it a staple of demoscene productions. A single looped pattern could generate minutes of mesmerizing animation.