Steve, you really need to review the ILDA data format standards here http://www.ilda.com/technical.htm.
This should be quite helpful to you. Yes, ILDA standard is a 16-bit (2 bytes) signed Integer.
The limit on how many points a frame may have is 65536. I really do not know what the lowest value for ILDA's pps is.
I don't know what most people do who write display drivers but in my opinion why have any delay between frames at all unless needed as a "special effect".
My preference would be to have a parameter that controls point-to-point delay which has the effect of controlling frame-rate and would range from "no delay" to some large value. And when optimizing the display accuracy of any image consideration must be taken for the lag speed inherent in the electro-mechanical, position feedback scanners. Let's say your software driver has the optimized capability to spit out 30,000 points-per-second over an 8 deg full-angle of scan area. Most likely the computer software and hardware can be far faster than this, but just as example you really want your scan angle to be 60 degrees full-angle, but your scanners can only keep up at 30,000 pps over 8 degrees of peak-to-peak deflection. If within your image of coordinate points you need the scan to deflect the beam from the 32767,-32767 coordinate (lower right hand corner, assuming front projection) then deflect to -32767, 32767 in the opposite diagonal over 60 degrees peak-to-peak, this cannot be done with just these two point values because the beam doesn't have time to get to the new point before it being told to go somewhere else. So there must be a variable inter-point delay before a new change in direction can be achieved accurately. The the bigger the point value deflection difference the more delay required between points. One way of doing this is to repeat the coordinate point in succession 3 to 6 times before outputting a new and different coordinate value to give the beam a change to reach its last target point. We used to refer to the consecutively repeated point values within an image "delay points" or "dwell points" since they compensated for the scanner reaction being far slower than the computer's ability to stream coordinate values to the DACs.
The new schools guys can probably shed more light on this topic. (I'm an old fart)
The plane of color you mentioned is nothing more than outputting a saw tooth wave for the X-axis (horizontal) that repeats about 30 times per second while outputting a sine wave on the Y-axis (vertical) that is "X" times faster than the horizontal signal. If X=1 then there will be one positive hump and one negative hump in the vertical plane e.g. one sine wave cycle. If X=8 then there will be 8 "sine waves" in the vertical plane. This is a good example of how the ratio of frequencies in the rate of what is happening in the X-axis compares with the rate of what is happening in the Y-axis. The type of waveform on the vertical axis determines the shape of the visual "waves". Use a triangle shaped waveform on the Y-axis and the waves have pointed peaks instead of rounded peaks.