Aha, the Free Pascal thing reminds me of the good old days of Pascal when writing pure code was the only way to get things done.

Thanks for the link to the OpenGL Tutorial - I am reading it now.

In my game the background is static. The only things that really change are the Reels which are painted one cell at a time to form a complete column and then drawn on screen.

I have tried to draw on a tbitmap in memory then flip it onto the visible screen but it creates a lot of flicker. The form1.doublebuffered property works well to resolve screen flicker.