Software sprite
A moving object the CPU draws into video memory itself, pixel by pixel, because there is no video chip to do it.
The ZX Spectrum, the Atari ST and the PC had no hardware sprites, so every moving character was a copy loop. Each frame runs the same three steps: save the background under the object, draw the object, and on the next frame restore the background before moving it. Get the order wrong and the object leaves a trail, as a fair number of commercial games demonstrated.
The upside is freedom: no eight-per-scanline limit, no fixed sizes or colour counts. The downside is that everything costs CPU time, so the number of things on screen was set by how fast you could shovel bytes. Hence the whole toolbox of tricks: masking, preshifted copies, compiled sprites and dirty rectangles. The Amiga's BOBs were the same idea with the blitter doing the grunt work.