Another thing I've had in mind, but never actually implemented, is this: Suppose you're doing something like kefrens bars with open sideborders. You repeat the last line of a row of characters and modify the font on the fly. But in the borders, you repeat sprite data, let's say one sprite on either side. That means you have a single graphics buffer consisting of 46 bytes, but those bytes are distributed somewhat irregularly in RAM. So make a table in zp consisting of 46 pointers to them. Then use (zp,x) in the drawing operations. You can even access neighbouring cells with (zp-2,x) and (zp+2,x).