It is true that you had an 9x9 grid to play around on, but your project was on the 68k sereies. You had a larger screen to play with. We would need to do 8x8 to accomplish similar here (a 12x8 or 8x8 grid with a hud).

but the 84 screen is only 96 pixels across and 64 pixels high

If we have over 256 sprites, we can always have sprite pallets for different areas.

Yes, that will definitely work. At 16x16 (or even 8x8) there won't even be >100 sprites on the screen st any given point.

I might have to pull back from this project a bit, life and A:P are keeping me quite busy as it is . I'll still be happy to act as a consultant, hehe, chipping in here and there though.

Anyway what I have to say here is that if you guys are going to go grayscale ARPG, you're going to have to sacrifice the 6mhz audience. Redrawing the screen isn't going to be an option, as that takes over 400,000 cycles by itself if you're drawing 2 layers for gray. So the screen is going to be needed to be backed up every frame to draw the enemies and whatnot; simply backing up 1,536 bytes of buffer, drawing the screen (3lvl gray) and restoring those 1,536 bytes is going to take over 123,512 cycles. In 6mhz, that's 48fps. Once you add in scrolling, enemies, and whatnot, the framerate isn't going to be anywhere close to the 45-60fps needed for decent grayscale. (Reference numbers: Horizontal/Vertical commands take about 20k cycles, drwaing an 8x8 sprite takes 2100 cycles. So scrolling with 2 16x16 grayscale sprites onscreen? Add 4*2*2*2100+2*20,000 = ~another 50,000 cycles, dropping the 6mhz framerate down to 30fps). 15mhz is going to be just about right to get you by.

I already have a much more efficient algorithm planned for scrolling a 3-level gray tilemap that should take around 50000 cycles. I posted my idea in the coding section and I have PMed chickendude for his knowledge on the subject.

Also, I have my own grayscale routine (probably not nearly as optimised as the one in Axe) that is still as fast as a regular screen update.

EDIT: Here are some sprites I found on my computer that y'all are free to use. The mini ones are the same sprites that I have been using for my other RPG series, the bigger ones were what I was designing a long time ago for an RPG featuring scrolling tilemaps with 16x16 gray tiles I will have to see if I have code for that, now

good idea, poll options then 8x8, 12x12 and 16x16?
And greyscale none, 3 or 4?

we need a poll for that as many people have different opinions

Wow that looks cool yeah i hope we can keep it in archive (run with shell?) cause that really looks cool

I'm not really sure on what sprite size I'd go for, tho I'm leaning towards 8*8 for memory and simplicity.
12*12 would be great if it can be made to work optimally both space-wise and speed-wise tho. Maybe the extra 4px on the bottom sould be used for a hud or something. (softkeys?)

As for the grayscale, a random thought that came to mind was maybe it have monochrome primarily, and have an option to make it 3-lvl gray for shininess if the player wants it? If they don't want it they could just not send an appvar or whatever with the masking sprites.