Now, regarding FJ's method: How would I go about drawing part of an image? Sphere's .blit() method for both surfaces and images only takes a single X and Y pair: the location to blit to, and then renders the whole image. Am I going to have to have one image for each type of tile instead of the usual tile sheet? Seems like that could get really messy really fast.
Oh and @Radnen: I already have plenty of experience doing tilemap engines, but thanks for the thought! I've written at least 4 of them already at various stages in Specs history, most of those in C++ before I discovered Sphere. I've even done a map editor or two--using the Win32 GDI API, so you can imagine how painful that was. For a while I had a nice RPG Maker-style IDE going to do the BattleMon project with (BattleMon being a Pokemon knockoff which eventually morphed into the Spectacles Saga as it exists now), called SuperSpeedGE.
Okay, so when you rendered the final map layers to the screen, what did you do? Just blit the whole image (using the camera to offset) and let the engine clip it? Because as I said, there's no way in Sphere to blit only part of an image/surface.
There is a version of the Majectic map engine here, but I think it's an earlier demo. To be honest I thought FJ was still using/developing that map engine for use in TurboSphere.