Thanks Manu for your responses. I was unfortunately off line for most of the last two days as my baby girl was quite ill.

What you've written does make sense and I will look into my options a bit further as you are correct DX8 was the last DirectX type library.  I will think about wrapping the C++ API directly but since this is not one of my strengths it may have to wait for a while.

Either way, thanks for looking into this.

Hubert