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I don't know how they designed Lemmings but you don't need to use sprites for all small moving objects, as you can do 'sprites' in software. Think about having a clear background in memory with your sprites somewhere else, then after copying the clear background you can just copy your 'sprites' onto it, e.g. using the blitter. If you have many objects, you might not be able to make it in one frame, but as I am sure you know, Lemmings doesn't always run at full 50 Hz (exploding all the lemmings will cause severe frame slowdowns).
That being said, you can have more than 8 hardware sprites on the screen simultaneously since you can change them while the screen is being drawn. Thus, you could actually change them every scanline, meaning 8 sprites per line.
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