After spending some time with the iPhone SDK, I've discovered that it is designed in a very Apple sort of way. Duh. The SDK is geared around using specific interface tools they give you. In my case I was trying to find a video buffer I could just write to. This sort of coding behavior has become frowned upon lately and for good reason. Writing to video buffers outside of a sandbox is what brought us exploitable code, viruses, and crashing software. This has given rise to the likes of managed code, .NET, Cocoa, take your pick of sandboxed safe coding environments. The iPhone SDK is no different. You can programatically create image objects (UIView) at instantiation time, after which they are read only. There are all sorts of ways, actually one very striaght forward way of animating them, moving them, and intercepting clicks on them. However if you have a graphics engine that generates a game state essentially by bit-blt-ing to a video buffer, it looks like the only possibility for doing this is going to be through OpenGL/ES which doesn't work on the simulator. So if I want to take this project any further I'm going to need to buy an iPhone.... drat.