I think this might be possible if you're willing to tolerate some
flicker.
Another way to do it would be to just change the color register of the
playfield on the fly. Isn't this what Klax does, and the Colorbars program?
You can also use dithering patterns to imply different colors or states.
Also, falling capsules could be animated using playfield rather than
sprites. The animation on these capsules is pretty linear, so it would
probably work okay.
But as long as you didn't have multiple capsules on the same scanline you
can reuse a wide ball or a missile just as well.
However, with Arkanoid, you'd need more bits per brick in order to
store its color, how many hits it has taken (for silvers), and whether or
not it hides a capsule. Assuming four bits per brick, that's only two per
byte, so an 8x16 field (for example) would cost 64 bytes. I'm pretty sure
Arkanoid fields could have more than eight rows, so the cost could be
higher.
Then it would be a good candidate for a Supercharger game (call it
Fireball2).
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