Yeah a bunch of people in my CS class decided to write Monopoly . Were using C++ of course anywho I was the only one who had any experience with programming windows or doing DirectX or anything but the thing is DirectX doesn't seem to want to work on the school computers I don't know why the program doesn't even seem to attempt to start Im using full screen res 640 480 16 bit color and it won't start. So I decided I was going to use just plain windows bitblt and the like but I really have no experience trying to do graphics with just plain windows after all DirectX is so much better. So my question is are there any good tutorials on writing games just using the Windows API? All I've been able to find are on DirectX and thats great I mean I would like to use DirectX but it won't work. Also if you have any reason why my program might not work at school that would be helpful too. Oh yeah the compiler is the free one from Borland you know Bcc32 program or whatever the command line tools and the program compiles with it and runs at my house also it will compile and run with VC++. So I figure its either the video card or something because I had the teacher take of security and it still wouldn't run at school. Oh, Im using directX7 just the directdraw part really and the runtime libs are on the computer at school latest version and all so I am at a loss. I am going to stop rambling now so Thankyou in advance.

I know for a fact that there are some good bitblt tutorials online, but I don't know where off hand. Try www.vbapi.com, even though it's geared towards Visual Basic, it does explain the API functions in good detail. Also try the MSDN libraries, they may be more difficult to understand though.

Have you tried installing DirectX 8.1 on the computer at school? Also check out SDL at libsdl.org.

Does the application run on any other computers (like at home)? If not, you might want to double-check your code. Also on WinNT (which is running on most of the computers at my school) I think it's only possible to use DirectX 3 or something.

Just trying to remember DirectX off the top of my head, but doesn't it have a debug mode, and if you compile in debug mode it won't run on a machine with just the retail version of DirectX installed?

If I'm right, then you need ot make sure your DirectX SDK is switched to retail/release mode and not debug mode, make sure you have the Retail version of DirectX 7.0 or later installed on school/uni computers. If it still doesn't work, I think you can set DirectX 8.1 to use software rendering only from the control panel.

It's almost certaintly due to the schools video card, or lack thereof. Most school computers do not have 3D accelerated video cards, necessary to do hardware rendering in DirectX, there should be a way to make it use software rendering instead in your program. Why not use OpenGL?

CodeRed, doesn't DirectX use software rendering if the graphics card doesn't support that feature anyway? I guess DirectX might think that the graphics card can do something it can't though, in which case it needs to be forced.

Yes but a good protion of the API functions require hardware rendering, you may be using some of those