You have to use some graphical space in either your game objects or each of your monster files. For me, I think that should be fine for what I have planned. Don't forget that you are limited to 64 sprites at a time. For me, I am using 8 sprites per bar, plus 4 sprites for the caps at the top and bottom which means 20 sprites are going to this health bar. Less sprites to uses on screen in general. Two less if you are also displaying a weapons bar. One less sprite available on the each scanline if you are just doing a health bar. Uses way less memory than the built in HUD to give you more room to work with other things. Read them all, or just the ones that are relevant to you. I am going to divide this post into 3 sections: The Pros and Cons of doing this, an attempt at a High-Level Explination on what the code does, and finally the code itself and How to Hook it Up. So I'll hunt those down at some point and add them to that post. If you follow the instructions there, it will disable the HUD, but there will still be some code elsewhere related to the HUD that is just taking up a little bit of space. A Small Edit: Here is the link to my post on how to disable the built in HUD, but I also need to update that post.