Drawing DIRECTLY to screen

[Alan]

is there a way to draw directly to the sreen with the extensive, easy to use, friendly WindowsAPI? If not are there any other extensive, easy to use, friendly APIs that could do this.

[Duthomhas]

That depends. What do you mean by "draw directly to the screen"?

Do you want to draw on the wallpaper?
Do you want to scribble over everything visible?

What kind of application are you making?
Something with a fancy "see through" window? (Like xneko or those stupid googly-eyes people like?)
Something like an interactive game?

Do background updates have to show, but not mess up your drawing?

[Alan]

I think I want to draw over everything else visible on the screen.
I plan to make a UI API from scratch for practice and so I need access to low-level drawing like that to be able to accomplish this.

[Kiana]

Uh lol, I don't know if this will work, but maybe you could try using TextOut() on HWND_BROADCAST?

[Duthomhas]

Alan, you are wasting your time barking up twisted trees.

Use the Win API to do UI. It is sufficiently low-level to make your UI API project work just fine. You do not need low-level drawing to do that kind of stuff.

[Lamblion]

Unless I am very much mistaken, the Win32 API does NOT allow direct drawing to the screen like in the old DOS days where you could access the screen direcrtly. That's part of the reason for the Win32 API in the first place, i.e., to remove the complications of certain direct low level operations. Petzold discusses this in some detail.