Resource files should be fully supported. DirectX does (at least I believe, been a long time since I've used DX7) have a ...FromResource (LoadSurfaceFromResource is it?) function for the loading. Though, I am quite heavily against resource files myself unless its for a small group of something highly relevant to one another such as the icons of your web browser. They just become difficult to update and manage along with updating a single graphic often requires updating the whole resource file. You can pretty much forget about using any form of encryption on it, too, unless you plan to do an encryption on every file individually before putting it in the resources (in which case you'd also have to write your own Load From Resource function), which makes things even messier. Reason I mention this is that many people seem to often associate resource files with security.