Well I made it through finals...finally. I hope everyone else is fairing alright. But on to better things. I've been thinking about my intention to strip party members as they depart. I had a few ideas with regard to how to handle it; the easiest of which would be to use the storage capacity of the Fat Chocobo. I had even thought of extending that further to allow for a completely separate storage for gear - maybe even dual functioning Namingway - Storingway does have a bit of a ring to it. That of course led me into where exactly I planned to save this data. I found a post from the long-long ago with some spaces in the rom to work with, so routines wouldn't be such a problem to work in now:
Per request from Leno...
Unused space (offsets with header):
7F31 = 623 BYTES
E055 = 1195 BYTES
10135 = 203 BYTES
181BE = 66 BYTES
1F3FB = 133 BYTES
200E3 = 285 BYTES
23B4C = 124 BYTES
23DD0 = 1072 BYTES
43AB9 = 1863 BYTES
5FF58 = 680 BYTES
*stopped here, that should be enough for now
The problem, of course, is SRAM: Not going to find much in there - and even if I did I'd never trust it through an entire play-through; even if I watched it the whole time. So given that I started thinking of How much I would need to store in SRAM vs what I could recalculate as needed. My first thought was to go through the event list and see what I could do-away with - hopefully at least freeing up some flags; if it came down to it I could always try playing games where you use a single index to store a bound double index. When my brain takes me on trips like that I usually end up:

I was actually starting to think about events when I decided to go back a look through some other posts to see if anyone else came up against this. I found a very handy list of events put together by this guy who is really-
really modest about his ASM cataloging:

...Since it seems that we're getting into the nitty gritty of the game's system. I think I'll list a number of non-essential events that can be safely replaced which are not important to the story as well as sprites that bear little on the game. I will also list their Trigger number and location for touch events.
Behemoth Battle 51 (Trigger 4 in Bahamut's Cave 2F)
Behemoth Battle 52 (Trigger 1 in Bahamut's Cave Bahamut's Floor)
Hummingways
Namingway
OUCH!
Cecil's Maid
Item Selection - Soft
Finding Odin before Feymarch (Trigger 1 in Baron Castle Odin's Room)
Devil's Road is sealed (Trigger 2 in Baron Devil's Road)
Staying at a 50 GP Inn (You could honestly only have one, all same have the screen go black, let the music play and reappear in front of Innkeeper the rest of it is just little niceties which aren't really necessary)
Staying at a 800 GP Inn
The current is too strong for us to get in! (Not necessary)
Giott: Open the Door! (I don't believe this is even used in its normal event)
Fallen soldier in Damcyan's basement (sad, but not necessary)
Staying at a 100 GP Inn
WA! (Not sure where this is even used)
Being poisoned by bartender in Mysidia (Mysidia events, while amusing, aren't necessary)
Staying at a 200 GP Inn
Speaking to White Mage in Mysidia
Being turned into a Toad by a Black Mage
Resting for free in Fabul (Trigger 3 in Fabul King's Room) (The Cecil bed can be used for that)
Staying at a 400 GP Inn
HP Restoring Pot
MP Restoring Pot
Being turned Mini in Baron's Classroom
Staying at a 1600 GP Inn
Staying at a 3200 GP Inn
Staying at a 6400 GP Inn
Staying at a 12800 GP Inn
Baron Dancer's Dance
Kaipo Dancer's Dance
Fabul Dancer's Dance
Agart Dancer's Dance
Mysidia Dancer's Dance
Baron Dancer's Dancer after killing Cagnazzo
Mythril 3 Dancer's Dance
Toroia Dance Troupe's Dance
Dwarf Castle Dancer's Dance
Reading the Magazine
Obtaining the Magazine
Obtaining a Grimoire 6C
Obtaining a Grimoire 6D
Trading the Pink Tail for Adamant Armor
Do you have a pass?
Watery Pass - North exiting message (Trigger 7 in Watery Pass 5F)
Behemoth Battle 50 (Trigger 0 in Bahamut's Cave Bahamut's Floor)
Obtaining a Grimoire 91
Viewing the Moon through the telescope
There may be a few more, but that should free up quite an amount of new events for people to use.
Seriously, way to go Grimoire! I mean that list was nothin' compared to all the routines you picked out and deciphered. I was going through those posts all

about it and then I hit your homemade recipes for FF-I spells and I was like

ok: Fanboy-set to off. But yeah color me impressed - and that's not to forget about Chillyfeez, Pinkpuff, or anyone not mentioned: all of you

Anyway - here's what I've got to contribute for now. I was looking back at the shadow data posts from Phoenix a few years back. I was intrigued by the approach taken there, cutting out unnecessarily stored data; but knowing that he had some trouble and my still being a noob I was thinking about more simplified approach. I've attached a few tables I put together for reference: they show every party formation that I could think of (please correct as necessary) and I was thinking through what shadow slots would be occupied as the game progressed. What occurred to me (and this has been discussed before) was that all five slots really needn't ever be occupied with one exception after leaving Fabul. It's there that all the slots are occupied, the next one that is loaded shortly thereafter is Tellah on Mt. Ordeal: technically Tellah (2) to be swapped out almost immediately for Tellah (3): the fully charged model. My idea (probably simpler than this post) is to load Tellah into the party after Rosa is taken, before the doomed sea-voyage. I had thought that I might be able to hide him, similar to Rydia in the Fabul battles; but thinking that those were specific battle setups that would be impractical.
I did think of one thing. When I first started thinking about hacking years ago the first thing I looked at in FF4 was the data for the party and I found that setting the first bit to 00 would remove the character from the party - but in function only: all the other data stayed where it was as if they never left - and you could even swap the position of the ghost and it would swap the data as if it were anyone else. Then just changing the bit back made it look as if it never happened. But that's my plan: when Rosa leaves take Tellah(1)'s data out of Shadow Slot 1 (I labeled it S:1 in my table w/ Tellah(1) = 04) and put it in the empty space Rosa left behind. While doing that nullify the first byte and it shouldn't show up.
Looking into it more that's what happens in the Fabul battles - leaving the RAM open reveals that Rydia's first byte is set to 00 as each battle starts and then goes back to her default of 83. Actually looking into it more I found out that the the old data for a character isn't removed even if copied to a shadow slot - instead that byte is zeroed out and the rest of the data remains until overwritten. So in a list what I plan is:
Fabul Battles - Rosa Departs
~~Copy S:1 --> Rosa's Slot Overwriting her Data
~~Set 1st Byte of Copied Data to Zero
Shipwreck
-Copy Rydia --> S:4
~~Copy Yang --> S:1 (instead of S:3)
-Rydia, Yang, and Edward are removed
Mysidia (Speak with Elder to Trigger Events) **
~~Set Tellah Byte to 84
-Palom & Porom Join
~~Set Tellah Byte to 00
** This is just a safety check - it makes sure Tellah doesn't lose overwrite-roulette
It should be fine if Tellah is either in the 4th or 5th slot
Mt. Ordeal
- Fire/Golbez Cutscene
~~Meet up with Tellah & Set Tellah Byte to 8A in place of "Join Event"
- All Other Events Normal
~~ Must Change Loading for Yang (2) with S:1 instead of S:3
This should leave S:3 blank the entire game - 64 bytes that as far as I can tell should never be touched. I figure this should be pretty easy to pull off, but that might just be my sleep deprived deliria talking...The Tellah copies should work as a straight-forward routine, and remapping Yang 1 & 2 should be just a few keystrokes in FF4kster!

That's it for now

Let me know what y'all think; sorry if any of this is redundant information. Please feel free to point me towards any relevant posts I may have missed. Thanks everyone!