If a bit is equal to one then that adds a certain value to the total of binary number. If you are unfamiliar with binary numbers, then here is a quick crash course on finding the value of a binary number. Each bar segment is a sprite and there are 8 sprites used for the entire health bar. The health bar is made up of 3 sections: Full bar segments, empty bar segments and sometimes one partial bar segment. Ok, I think you have been sufficiently warned. It wouldn't be difficult modify the code to make the health bar have more divisions, but that would either mean more sprites on screen, more graphic space being used, or both. The easy 'fix' to this is to have all enemies give at least 8 points of damage. You need to take about 8 points of damage to see the bar go down 1 step. This means if you are at full health and take 1 point of damage, you will not see a visual change. The way I have it written, the health bar goes from 0 to 255, but it only has 32 increments. I bet there is a way you could re-purpose that space, but I haven't looked into it, so I don't know what would be involved. Unless you're using also textboxes, the HUD graphics may end up going unused which means that some of your background graphics space will go to waste. I went with putting the graphics in my game objects. You have to use some graphical space in either your game objects or each of your monster files. For me, I think that should be fine for what I have planned. Don't forget that you are limited to 64 sprites at a time. For me, I am using 8 sprites per bar, plus 4 sprites for the caps at the top and bottom which means 20 sprites are going to this health bar. Less sprites to uses on screen in general. Two less if you are also displaying a weapons bar. One less sprite available on the each scanline if you are just doing a health bar. Uses way less memory than the built in HUD to give you more room to work with other things. Read them all, or just the ones that are relevant to you. I am going to divide this post into 3 sections: The Pros and Cons of doing this, an attempt at a High-Level Explination on what the code does, and finally the code itself and How to Hook it Up. So I'll hunt those down at some point and add them to that post. If you follow the instructions there, it will disable the HUD, but there will still be some code elsewhere related to the HUD that is just taking up a little bit of space.

A Small Edit: Here is the link to my post on how to disable the built in HUD, but I also need to update that post.

Megaman zero style x sprite sheet