Just implemented atlasing for RFN fonts. The original implementation used individual ALLEGRO_BITMAPs for each glyph, which I suspect was the main reason for minisphere's horrible text-rendering performance up to now. The drag became especially noticeable in Spectacles when the console was displayed. Now it seems to be much better!
Not supporting this was the reason it didn't work for me, and likely the reason it doesn't work properly in SSFML either--it only tracks one delay script at a time.
Also I really need to implement more of the API esp. zone and trigger execution nuances, etc. I just need to find the time sometime to do it.
Edit: Okay, I really need to shut up. Leave me to my own devices for an hour and I figure stuff out every single time. Instead of traversing the map, I set up a system where I walk the tileset and, at render time, remap the tile indices passed in from the map engine to their current animation state. Funny thing about it: I ended up looking at the Sphere source again after doing this, and it turns out Sphere uses this exact same system, the code for it is just a lot sloppier.
This is the part where I'll be honest: minisphere's development was largely motivated by self-interest.