isn't render_to_texture onto a view entity possible?

That may be what I'm doing already with view.bmap (though to be honest, I'm just learning about all this now). What I'd ultimately like to do is:

1. Render the view to a 1024x768 bitmap.
2. Copy that view to a 256x192 bitmap (rather than re-rendering the whole thing).
3. Overlay #2 on #1 (e.g., bitmap #2 is displayed with 50% alpha, stretched to 1024x768).
4. Possibly use additive blending when overlaying (perhaps using the SDK?) to get a poor man's bloom effect.

btw, Ichiro: your games rock!

Thank you! That's nice of you to say. :)