Win GDI functions?

The Win32 GDI has several functions to do what you want:

TransparentBlt() will do transparent blits:

BOOL TransparentBlt(
HDC hdcDest,
int nXOriginDest,
int nYOriginDest,
int nWidthDest,
int hHeightDest,
HDC hdcSrc,
int nXOriginSrc,
int nYOriginSrc,
int nWidthSrc,
int nHeightSrc,
UINT crTransparent
);

AlphaBlend() will do alpha blending:

AlphaBlend(
HDC hdcDest,
int nXOriginDest,
int nYOriginDest,
int nWidthDest,
int hHeightDest,
HDC hdcSrc,
int nXOriginSrc,
int nYOriginSrc,
int nWidthSrc,
int nHeightSrc,
BLENDFUNCTION blendFunction
);

AlphaBlend() may not work properly if you try to use it on a large area, like the whole screen. But it does work on small parts of the screen.

I don''t recommend either of these two functions because they are slow. But if you did your alpha blending using GDI, it''d still probably be just as slow.

As for the buffers question, yes you can, sort of:

HDC hWindowDC; HDC hMemoryDC; RECT rect; HBITMAP hbitmap; hWindowDC = GetDC(hwnd); hMemoryDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hWindowDC); GetClientRect(hwnd, ▭); hbitmap = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hWindowDC, rect.right, rect.bottom); SelectObject(hMemoryDC, hbitmap); PatBlt(hMemoryDC, 0, 0, rect.right, rect.bottom, WHITENESS); //You can now use MemoryDC to draw stuff. //Draw what you want, and then do this: BitBlt(hWindowDC, 0, 0, rect.right, rect.bottom, hMemoryDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY); ReleaseDC(hwnd, hWindowDC); DeleteDC(hMemoryDC); DeleteObject(hbitmap);

Those API functions require Windows 98 or later, or Windows 2000 or later. If your app runs on any other system, it will fail; to avoid this, you''ll need to dynamically link to them.