I personally would rather see as much memory as possible given to the game engine and main engine if thats where it fits in. Seems to be that the slowness will not be so slow its unbearable and that by having that extra space we can make the game look better / sqeeze in more content

Ehh. That's not quite what I meant. The point's null anyway. I'm not going to prebuffer the menu frames themselves, but the image files *will* be buffered. To help make the buffering scheme a bit clearer, I'll let some of the source do the talking
;VARIABLE EQUATES FOR ROUTINES LOCATED AT $9D95
ramseg1       = $9D95 ;0107b Common routines for multipage app management
ramseg2       = $9E00 ;0256b Common data resource tables
ramseg3       = $9F00 ;2048b |   Menu data buffer    | Stg background buffer |
ramseg4       = $A700 ;1024b |Menu system img buffer |  Second bullet table  |
ramseg5       = $AB00 ;0512b |Menu system img buffer | Spellcard background  |
ramseg6       = $AD00 ;4096b |Menu system img buffer |Script resource buffer |
ramsegend     = $BD00 ;8043t
The game field and the menu system are exclusive, therefore, can overlap perfectly. The menu data itself shouldn't be more than 2KB and the image data, no more than 4KB.

On another note, I got the title screen to work again
The banner on the top is a 96x15 .bmp file, and the background is a fullscreen 96x64 image file (shuffled into the gray buffer). Yup. I've gotten how to pull the .bmp files together. It's mostly batch script based, but the script you should be editing is fully documented. At least, I think it's documented well enough...

Nice. Is this how the grayscale will look like now, by the way?

I'm glad this is still progressing nicely.

Got character selection working. There will be up to 8 characters in the game. Some will be unlockable. Short post. Uncomfortable posting while lying on the floor.

EDIT (5-16-2011 11:11 EST) : Wrote in some high score menu logic. Didn't get anything to actually display quite yet.

Added to the Results menu, showing what I have so far of the high score menu. You can already guess where the scores are gonna be.

Note: Up to three high scores in each category are going to be kept at a time.
EDIT: Four high scores. Just re-read my spec sheet.

Change: Added character sprites before name, which was the original reason why the space was there. Tell me whether or not it looks better this way, or if you want it name only. Screenshot animated to demonstrate alignment.

Still need to put in code to read out the scores.

EDIT: Think it might be better to put the sprite into the gray layer?

I like it better with the sprites.   Lookin' great.

A screenshot that demonstrates the completed (excepting for additional character slots) character select screen, a completed high score screen, and a mostly filled out general statistics screen. I access the gen stats screen twice to show that "game uptime" is actually being kept in the background. The "game uptime" keeps track of the number of frames the game has gone through (which is roughly 24-32 frames a second).

None of the scores are real; they were created by the script to demonstrate that the score entries can be accessed in a manner that conforms to the spec sheet. I also noted one bug with respect to the small sprite display in the character select menu, regarding what is in the gray layer. I'm going to explore that routine to figure out what is up with that. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look carefully at those 8x8 sprites at the right when it changes between the normal character set and the secret character set, then back again. You'll see it. It should either be all black or all gray, but not both.

EDIT: Nevermind about that bug that I just mentioned. It was being caused by me not clearing off the gray buffer between frames.