2D graphics engine/sprite library

Anonymous needs to make a 2D renderer in C that will display sprites taken from a cell-based 3D space in 2D in the style of traditional 2D RPGs (for example: http://www.jinseirpg.com/~screenshots/tests/Tales%20of%20Phantasia/top09.jpg ).

Can you suggest a sprite library to abstract from calling the low-level graphics library functions (like SDL, which is what I would use if I can't find anything neat, etc.), that runs under Linux, that would do at least truecolor sprites with color-key transparency?

Full graphics engines doing these kind of graphics I could adapt are welcome too.

Thanks!

My suggestion as usual is to roll your own based on SDL+OpenGL or something similar. Color keying can be offloaded to an alpha channel at texture load time (0 vs 255 or you could have transparent sprites with real alpha), and you get other effects like stretching/rotation and transparency/color blending for "free". It shouldn't take more than a day to whip up a Sprite class and/or a Texture class or something. Of course this won't abstract away anything at first but you can have your api the way you like it.