TIP : Do NOT use ImageFromImage if using MIDP 1.0. It loses transparency information. Apparently it works in MIDP 2.0.
It is also very s l o o o o w, at least it was for me. In the end I ended up spending one lunch-time cutting each bitmap out of composite so that I could make use of the transparency and stored everything into image arrays. This worked well and everythin speeded up quite nicely.

I think I'll use the alphabet array and do look-ups. I swear I remember less each year .