VBGamer

This is a very touchy subject, unisys have held the patent for lzw compressed gifs for about 10 years now, and it's only recently they have started hitting out at people for breach of licensing. Basically they expect you to pay them thousands of dollars for a license to write (and more recently they have added read to that). Gif's are basically a no-no any more unless you want to pay them a huge license fee plus royalties. PNG's are my favourite format, but you will be lucky to be able to read/write them with VB as it is a VERY complex file system including compression. If you used a seperate DLL or OCX to read them there would be no problem (in fact i have written a free one for release, which loads most useful formats) but as you don't want to do this, then it's slightly more complicated. The only way you can really cut the size of your images down is to compress them, and decompress them on the fly (assuming you want lossless compression (unlike JPG)) (I can send you a C++ DLL to do this, not ActiveX, meaning it just has to sit in your app/game directory (or windows/system)) but again if you dont want an external dll to do the work, unless you have VB Source code to efficiently decompress and compress files then you are a bit stuck. Basically it goes like this, reading uncompressed formats in VB are not that hard to do, i.e PCX can be done, but is much like a 256 colour bitmap (there are examples of how to read PCX's in VB on <http://www.planet-source-code.com> However if you want to read compressed images directly into VB without external dependencies then you will be very lucky to find anything of use. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, unfortunately the world of VB is limited to JPG's and BMP's (and PCX's, and even GIF's if you have a huge bank account =) Adam