Yes, that would be one good way to solve it - providing you can load and unload them fast enough, it means you could make your maps any size you like.
That's pretty much how platypus did it - it was a very simple system - if it tried to draw a sprite that wasn't in memory, it loaded it in then and there. And if availvidmem() ever dropped below 2Mb, it would start deleting currently unused sprites from memory, one per frame. Pretty crude system sure, but it worked for my needs. And it meant that it made the most of however much vidRAM the user had - the more the better - although it would still run on 8MB of vidRAM, even if it had little jerks here and there.
That's pretty much how platypus did it - it was a very simple system - if it tried to draw a sprite that wasn't in memory, it loaded it in then and there. And if availvidmem() ever dropped below 2Mb, it would start deleting currently unused sprites from memory, one per frame. Pretty crude system sure, but it worked for my needs. And it meant that it made the most of however much vidRAM the user had - the more the better - although it would still run on 8MB of vidRAM, even if it had little jerks here and there.