One could argue that the details are all there, one needs only to be able to understand the schematics.
Philosophy aside, the simple fact is that if you can't read schematics, and you can't understand MAME's code, you're not going to have much luck in tracking the information down.
To answer your question more directly though, Commando hardware had a fixed 256-color palette supplied by a set of PROMs that were different depending on the game running on the hardware (either Commando or Space Invasion).
It had three layers of graphics: "text" for things like scores and, well, text, "tiles" for the background layer, and then sprites on top of that. The text layer is limited to the topmost 64 colors of the palette (indices 192 to 255), the background tiles are limited to the bottom-most 128 colors of the palette (indices 0 to 127), and the sprites are limited to 64 colors (indices 128 to 191).
Text-layer tiles are 8x8, tile-layer tiles are 16x16, and sprite tiles are 16x16.
Text-layer tiles, tile-layer tiles, and sprites could be independently flipped on the X or Y axes.
The layer drawing priority is always in the order Text -> Sprites -> Tile, from front to back.
The text layer and tile layer contain 1 kilobyte, each, of tile RAM to indicate tile indices, and 1 kilobyte, each, of attribute RAM to indicate tile attributes (such as the color palette and flip bits). Both are arranged in a 32x32 grid of text tiles or tile-tiles.
Since the tile layer uses 16x16 tiles and 32*16 gives you a usable size of 512x512-pixels, the tile layer can also be scrolled independently in the X and Y directions.
The screen has an overall timing of 256x256 pixels, but the topmost 16 lines of pixels are reserved for the vertical-blanking interval, so only 256x240 pixels are usable.
Hopefully that's a sufficient amount of information.
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Re: VDP or equivalent for Capcom Commando hardware
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