Akari... things about the background
Technically speaking with some tweaking it could be made resolution independant by using a fully rendered texture (instead of blocks from a texture palette) for each layer of the display. Everything can be rendered for or at 320x224 view port resolution then pasted to the display using the texture layer. This is automatically independant of the the original resolution. The only problem might be offset acuracy for areas where there are Green/Red/yellow/blue/aqua and various other colors in the tile sets in the background area and overlaying sprite. I don't think this would be a problem, but it is possible. I think using an combination of orthographic and perspective rendering is going to be our anoying but necessary end of this.
I knew this would come up SOMEDAY. (sigh)
Here is the problem if you look at the background data
Old Ancient Forest image created from dead source code
The complete background is 1088x240 (so I cut it off a chunk of it for viewing purposes and set the subsampling on the Jpeg 1:1:1)
As you can see those green regions on the image are sections which have something static overlayed on them.
The large open white sections are sections that are likely animated. Also you'll notice the trap flower there (carnivorous plant) is open that also is overlayed by a section of background.
So the problem is? If any perspective correction is used, there will be some difficulties. This one is not a big deal but some of the backgrounds such as Costa Del Sol use perspective correction a lot. The character is perspectively corrected (3d wise) whereas the 2d part is viewed orthogonally (3d wise).
Anyone have thoughts?