Just a note on fading. Full screen fades are slower than ever in ANY non-hardware accelerated method. I'm not saying that you can only do them in OpenGL or Direct3D, but without hardware anything like fading, rotation, scaling, or more will be much much slower without hardware acceleration support.

Back in the DOS days early graphics programmers would use special features of the CPU (MMX, other Pentium features, etc) to try to boost their drawing speed, but this often required the use of Assembly which I don't think is all that accessible or easy to do these days on modern Windows.

Lets face it, you won't 'need' to use OpenGL or DirectX, but honestly it will make your game lighter on resources and in turn less sluggish and easier to do fast graphics enhance the look with a little bit of bling on your screen.

End sales pitch...