I could've sworn that I remember seeing this explained in a thread somewhere, but I can't think of the search word combo I used to get it when I was looking for something not even related to this. Of course. Does anyone know of any efficient ways to add transparency (or translucency, late night) and scaling to a sprite WITHOUT using OpenGL?

As far as I know, with allegro, you can either use rotate_sprite() or draw_trans_sprite() combined with set_trans_blender().
But you cannot display a transluent rotated sprite directly.
One solution is to prerender rotated sprites and keep them in memory as BITMAP*s and then use draw_trans_sprite().

I agree that Fblend tends to work faster. But is there a way to scale it first, then fblend_trans without using clear_to_color?

I would assume you would have to do something like this:

BITMAP *sprite = load_bitmap(whatever);
BITMAP *sprite_buffer = create_bitmap(SCREEN_W, SCREEN_H);

//Drawing Loop
clear_to_color(sprite_buffer,255,0,255);
rotate_scaled_sprite(sprite_buffer, sprite, 0, 0, 0, ftofix(scale));
fblend_trans(screen, sprite_buffer, 0, 0, trans_value);

Am I wrong? Is there a more efficient way than that? I would MUCH rather not use the clear_to_color function inside the game loop because it slows down the FPS on older machine (PII, PIII) by 12 FPS.

Oh well, yeah, I know about double buffering, etc. My main point of that post was to focus more on the calls to scale and trans the sprite than anything else. I didn't think that me putting "screen" vs "buffer" would make a difference in my post, since it's for hypothetical purposes only.

BELIEVE ME. It makes a difference. On older computers anyway. My newer computers aren't affected by it. I'm thinking of just clearing the sprite buffer before I even start the loop, I'll let you know how it works out.

Alright, I have it handled. Since the sprite is actually getting larger in size, there's no need to clear_to_color inside the loop and it works perfectly.