Thanks Cyanide for your info about the character state on the continue screen.
It gives me an idea...you could use the characters animations to show a timer counter( although it would end the game when zero was reached), you could also show fx, other characters (from the char's SFF), even whole backgrounds on the continue screen.
Also, you said you can't change or move the font, but I had a mvc style font on my continue screen before. I searched through my collection of system.def's and found some code that customizes the continue screen a bit:
[Continue Screen]
enabled = 1
pos = 640,240 ;Position
;***Known issue*** The display elements below use the fight.def resources
;instead of the ones defined in this file.
continue.text = "CONTINUE?"
continue.font = 1,0,0
continue.offset = 0,0
;Inactive and active (selected) YES/NO text
yes.text = "YES"
yes.font = 1,0,0, 128,128,128
yes.offset = -80, 60
yes.active.text = "YES"
yes.active.font = 1,3,0
yes.active.offset = -80, 60
no.text = "NO"
no.font = 1,0,0, 128,128,128
no.offset = 80, 60
no.active.text = "NO"
no.active.font = 1,3,0
no.active.offset = 80, 60
...As you can see, the font, colors, positioning and the text displayed can be altered. I've been using some True Type Fonts that would look nice for that.
Thanks for the response.