what would the best way of doing something with the whole "location on the vertical of the screen is reflective of left to right"? I assume that it'd first be a check for if the character is going up or down on the Y axis then use that to change the Z offset on the fly sort of deal thus far.

but if i have the ground at a 90 degree x rotation, that doesn't fix the fact the character goes down on the screen. so unless i do on the fly Y offset correction too, it'll look weird. with the ground at 45 degrees my initial idea would work but not look as good. thoughts on it?

Firstly, have a look at Circle Circus or World Runner scripts. It solved partly the problem. Decide a reference altitude of the ground  groundY then adjust every shape offset with this value.

But the core issues is still here. With games like River City Ransom or Double Dragon or Ninja Turtle in which characters truly move in three dimensions (xz plain  + jumping) there is just no way to calculate those values from just 2d position x,y. In this case we need to know the nes ram address that stores the character's current altitude y. Only with that info we could finally calculate the other two value  x,z and truly reconstruct the 3d scene of the game.

duly noted. got it put down in a seperate file along with relevant sections of the ram map (i gathered the Y position in NES memory in itself would also be useful so i noted that with the how far player is above ground level address) and your advice. for the moment i'll be looking at other projects scripting wise though.