Linked lists of spryte control blocks are prepared in memory (108) and transversed by a spryte rendering engine. Each spryte control block (106) controls the rendering of a respective spryte into the display buffer, and contains such information as a pointer to source data for the corresponding spryte, positional an incrementing specifications for a destination quadrilateral, a control word for manipulations to be performed on the spryte image source data, and an indication of which of several available formats the spryte image source data is packed in. Once the linked list is prepared, the spryte rendering engine (106) can be called by writing certain values into specific memory-mapped hardware registers, and then writing dummy data to an address recognized by the hardware as a command to initiate the spryte rendering operation (106).