Sang-drax, I agree that sometimes it's not needed to know what goes on under the hood, but I've already started with DirectDraw, and I don't feel like abandoning my half-ported game just yet :( And also, I just feel like doing DirectDraw first, since I once took a course with Direct3D and it went right over my head with matrix world/universe axis-level transform boundary checking, and other confusing stuff like that, and I'm sort of scared :D
And I think I'll stop saying "Thanks for the help MrWizard", because it's getting repetitive :p
**EDIT**
MrWizard, looking at the transparency tut you attached, I'm looking at this line:
unsigned short AlphaVal = lpSourceLine[ ALPHA_OFFSET ];
Is that just retreiving the alpha value of a certain pixel? If so, I'm sort of confused about how to put the alpha value there to begin with, since Paint doesn't support 32 bit bitmaps, and neither does Paintshop Pro 7 (or at least I don't think so).
**EDIT2**
Hmm, new idea: loading a greyscale image for the alpha channel. Would this work?
And another thing, on the second line ( :rolleyes: ), you have Alphaval * Opacity (...). You mentioned that it is combining the two, but how exactly..? Is it something like "50% of 50% of the pixel gets copied"?