Overlays not available in Windows?

I’ve queried my Windows XP GDI Generic Msft to see if I can use overlays, and I get back a resounding ‘no’.

Here’s what I need to do:
We have several 2D symbols moving in various x/y directions on the display. To give the illusion of movement, I’m drawing the background color of the previous x/y coordinate, then drawing the new x/y coordinates in a foreground color. This produces a moving symbol. But we also need to display bitmapped text on the display. The problem is, a symbol moving over the text will erase the text.

So I wanted to draw the text (once) to an overlay and keep the overlay visible all of the time. I assume the moving symbols on the normal plane would not erase the bitmapped text on the overlay plane.

But my system does not support overlays. Does anybody have any suggestions?

I’ve not used the stencil buffer yet - could that be used to solve my problem?

Redraw your entire scene each frame. symbols and font included.

glClear(AllBufferBits);
DrawScene();
MoveSymbols();
//repeat.