Hi Zenkai,
First: Never stop asking questions.
Second: You can still use a tile system with your maps, just have a specified size per tile (32x32 or something like that), and then you can write your own program that can placed them on a grid then save them. You should have images like trees and rocks and other objects that will be turned into sprites and have 2d collision set up with them. Then your next step is to make the important sprites like buildings, then have separate sprites for doors, because then if you detect collision on the door sprite you can load the "inside the building" map. Then you add people such as the player, enemies, creatures, and so on and so forth. All you really need is a lot of work with MS Paint to make classic Zelda style graphics.
As far as scrolling goes, you could have the player sprite centered on the screen, and just move everything else. Or you could approach it like the gameboy and NES Zeldas where you can move around in a little square area then move it over if they move past the border. To get a cool scrolling effect here's some pseudo code:
Temporarily Disable Player Input
For every X milliseconds...
move map over X units
This may be a little unclear, but I hope you at least got an idea of how to go about this.
keep asking,
crazy donuts
Juvenile Industries
Current Project: KillZone(FPS)
Soon to come:An rts, and a snowball fight game
