I changed the set_motion_blur function in mine to fade the blur out when
you "turn it off" instead of it just ending abrubtly...

That's a good idea; in fact, I'll have to try having it slide around according to the player's speed and so forth as well.

So all you use as render target is a fully black tga as transparent panel?

Yep; though that brings up a good point -- what's the best bitmap format to use? I'll have to try 565, 888, and 8888.

When you turn bloom on, the screen slowly turns white and multi-colored. Any ideas?

I'm not familiar with Sphere, but perhaps overlaying the entire scene with a semi-transparent black bitmap?

you could try something similar with a 2nd view overlaying the first

I'll give that a try. I'd like to do that without having to render the view twice, though. I'll open a new thread on that.