HUD Alpha help please.

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/HUD Alpha help please.

Allow me to bug you smart people with a simple issue I am having. What I am after is displaying a HUD image on the screen. That part works great, and it cuts out all the black like I want. But now I want the visible part to be semi-transparent.

Here is my code;

;Load HUD
hud=LoadImage("./images/hud1.bmp")
MaskImage hud,0,0,0
DrawImage(hud,1,657)

So I thought I could get away with;
EntityAlpha hud,.5

You guessed it, that does not work. So how do I get my HUD image to be semi-transparent?

thanx to anyone who can help :)