Feel free to use/to refer to it. I'm pretty sure, I'm not the first one to have come up with something like this. (My part in this is really in organizing the data and the related 6502 code for rendering, maybe the hot-one encoding for the lower 3 bits of the displacement offset to make this suitable for 8-bit processing.)

See “Sphere Mapping” by Frédéric Goset for further reference on compiling a static displacement map to render a spherical projection from a cylindrical one: http://fredericgoset.ovh/informatique/oldschool/en/spheremap...

BTW, I'm now using 32 × 100 pixels (or rather, data points), which doesn't change much, other than adding a few bytes to the data stream for the world map (we're just adding 4 columns or 16 bytes to this).