Michael, you should not compress your images so much. Look at the reds and the text and all that. It's barely readable. What exactly are you doing to destroy those images so much?
He's using .JPG.... >_<
JPG doesn't have to look bad. It only gets that "mosquito noise" when it is severely compressed. in Photoshop, I never set the level below 7. 8 is preferred.
Adding PCE console specific layer on top of that, makes for an interesting challenge (no, not a reference to Ys II).
So, I can't get the Dragon Saber hi-res trick to work in any emulator. And Dragon Spirit requires far too many resets for me to want to bother doing it with my actual PCE.
t2k has a bad-ass cheat list.