Help with masked textures

I've got a sprite which sits above my players head telling you bits and bobs of info.

I create a texture from within the program using the mask flag 4. I writepixel with a zero value to all pixels in the texture and then print some text on it.

I don't want to be able to see any of the black part of the texture but it seems that the only way I can do this is using entityblend 3 which I can't use 'cos I want to use alpha to fade the sprite in/out.

Can anyone out there show me a working example of this as my sanity is hanging by a thread!!

Just set alpha flag true on texture creation .. then set black pixels to $00000000 (argb all zero).
Pixels that should be visible write like $FF225533 (alpha = $ff ,r = $22, g = $55, b = $33).

Alternatively, you *can* do fades with entityblend 3 - by changing the colour to fade it out.