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!

Uh... if your operating system supports the card, Allegro does. Isn't this obvious?

Do you really think any modern graphics kit still makes calls directly to the card? No, they use what X, framebuffer, DirectX, or whatever other abstraction is available on the OS.

This isn't the DOS era any more. We have these things called "drivers" we install in the OS for a reason.