Drawing sprites using any colour as transparent

One of the problems with the method that many sites will propose for drawing sprites is that you are forced to either use one particular colour for the mask colour, or have a separate picture stored for the mask. Or both. Unfortunately, this is often not very practical, and so you might think of using the conveniently existent TransparentBlt API. Annoyingly, the nice people at MS who wrote this function overlooked the fact that there's a horrible memory leak in it, and so it's a bad idea to use it. So what do you do? Well, you could either get the pixels using GetDIBits and 'blit' manually, or you can use several BitBlt calls and a couple of extra memory DCs to draw your image transparently.

Here's the code to do so:

   Private Sub TransparentBlt(ByVal hDestDC As Long, ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long, ByVal cx As Long, ByVal cy As Long, ByVal hSrcDC As Long, ByVal xSrc As Long, ByVal ySrc As Long, ByVal lTransparentColor As Long)
       Dim mDC As Long, mBmp As Long
       Dim hTmpDC As Long, hTmpBmp As Long
       Dim hMonoDC As Long, hMonoBmp As Long
       Dim lOldBkColor As Long
       
       mDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hDestDC)
       mBmp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hDestDC, cx, cy)
       DeleteObject SelectObject(mDC, mBmp)
       
       hTmpDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hDestDC)
       hTmpBmp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hDestDC, cx, cy)
       DeleteObject SelectObject(hTmpDC, hTmpBmp)
       
       hMonoDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hDestDC)
       hMonoBmp = CreateBitmap(cx, cy, 1, 1, ByVal 0