Phenomenal work guys! Really enjoyed this read. Even if a lot of these things are beyond me atm.
Just recently started delving more and more into the TA side of things. This is untested but if we are dealing with greyscale images isn’t it possible to make a flipbook texture with RGB channels and save a texture in each? This way you could have higher resolution and I guess fewer texture lookups. I guess you could just look at texture at X position for RGB, display move to next position look at texture at Y at RGB, display etc.