I stumbled upon this excellent write up of how Street Fighter 2 worked by breaking characters down into many 16x16 sprites. https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html
It got me thinking .. what number could BE NG handle?
I already upped the number background layers to 6 and screen memory to 5x screen height without impact. 256 sprites would open up a lot of possibilities!!
I’ll give it a try at some point.