Well, that would require blending of some sort (either alpha blending or color modulation) on the sprites, which DirectDraw, unfortunately, does not do. You would have to use Direct3D. You would use a rectangle of D3DTLVERTEX's and map it with your sprite image. You can then apply all kinds of neat effects to it.

you could actually access the surfaces manually and do the effects yourself, which isn't that hard. the only problem is that the speed is bad, at least it was for me.

I'm still in the planning stages of my first game. I'm trying to figure out ahead of time what kind of special effects I will be able to get. I'm trying to acheive a glowing effect around a torch; I'd like to animate the colors on the background and the sprites that move in front of it. Does anyone have any idea how, other than palette scrolling? I saw some stuff about alpha channels and multi-pass texturing, but that's all for Direct3D.

If you want, you can e-mail me at Dan@2mikes.com.

From what i understand, the speed of applying your own effects should be fine, as long as you make sure you are working on surfaces in system memory, working on video card memory is very slow.