Jared, I reccommend a user-defined type I made called AnimSurf2D. It is already a solid performer speed-wise because of direct access to graphics arrays. I made a few custom blit subs that are not that difficult to understand. they do their own clipping (otherwise, because it's direct array access you can get array bounds error), masking and alpha-blending and simple colorize effects. The subs work with the type, and you can also bitblt the type because one member of the type holds the 'memory dc' of device-independent bitmaps (bitmaps stored in memory) created with windows api. so with the type you get all these pieces of information: width, height, totalpixels, direct access to the actual bitmap array by 2 different ways .. as Long (for speed) or as byte for quality image processing. plus i have a 'high resolution' array (heavy on memory but provides lossless spectrum shift operations if you know how to do that sort of thing) (i wrote a sub that for that) and a createsurfacefromfile sub that writes 255 into the alpha channel of the surface for every pixel that is not black, for simple mask operation of one of my custom blit subs.

The biggest advantage though is how easy it all is to use. Let me know and I will post an example