I am curious about Time-Elapsed Photographic Methods for Animated Background Creation. Has anyone here attempted this or something similar to this? The ROM Hack on which I am working will include Animated Backdrops, created through the Time-elapsed Photographic Method. 

I was told by a moderator only to stop posting my greeting & adieu in all-capitalisation. I edited the above message accordingly, substituting capitalisation with italicisation.

Edit:--I have just read Nightcrawler's post in this thread, which deals with the above.

i'm not getting what you mean by "animated time-elapsed photographic backgrounds". what does that even mean? the whole POINT of a time-elapsed photograph is to compile a large amount of movement into a single image. now you want to animate that image...?

I do believe he might be desiring to do < (whatever FPS the unit can handle).
The problem with 'photographs' or better put digital images is the data they represent is quite large.
So first you would need a method of compression (JPEG is good for this) then you need a method of decompression so you'll have to write some sort of DCT (discret cosign transform).  Using the JPEG reference library is a good start, however depending on the target platform the reference model can be slow.  I know someone who wrote a very fast JPEG decoder for the GBA once (kind of cool making a ROM image with his util).

There are more than just a few problems.  It mostly depends on your target platform what you can do.  I think an 8bit platform and JPEG are not a good mix for this method.  If the video is only tiles, JPEG is pretty much right out, as you would have to render the JPEG blocks into a buffer and run a quick quantization of the colors picking nearest neighbor etc, way too much going on for tiles.
Using an animated GIF for your data source would be best then as all the quantization etc. is done for you already.  Keep your image small and load each frame into new tiles for the animation in the background while displaying the first set.  Gif animation format can optionally only update sections that change.  That might be a good thing to use to build your animation tile sets for each frame.  Depending on the time you need for the animation your frame count could get larger than your available space.  That's just off the top of my head really.

Cyb