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OMO, are you alive, Mlg???

No I'm dead.

And good news for using XNA 4. Your engine can be very cross platform.
XNA Games can be ported to Mac and Linux using MonoGame; Heck even iOS, with a license of course though.

So if Cross platform is what you're aiming for, I'd Google MonoGame and do some research in converting your XNA Project to it. It's not THAT hard. All the code stays the same. Only things like shaders become a little more harder to do. (Personally Speaking)

If you aren't too sure on how to do this, then I'd just keep going as you are right now. You can always convert your project to MonoGame at any time. But it just makes things easier if you did it now.

XNA is no more supported by Microsoft. It is going to be unemployed in future. That was a real shock for me a year ago. Maybe, Mono shall be a chance for revival, but we can not expect something marvellous from a not-really-known engine.

Do not forget commas after "No,", "Yes,", please.

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Having the original games sprites load from the original files would be even better too. With a custom ContentManager class in XNA you could load them like you would with any normal texture file.

Edit: Also when loading the animations from the original BAN/BND files, transparency will already be added to the textures. So you don't even need to supply a Color Key.

That's how the test worked when I made it, it creates a memory stream to obtain the bitmaps, keys out the pixels and then loads them into a Texture2D object using SetData(Colour[] Data). Slow, but effective.

If you can figure out a way to read them straight from transparent resources, I'd be glad to add it. ;) Of course the bitmap alternative is there if someone really wants to use a bmp for whatever reason.

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I've heard of Mono before, sounds good to me; I'll look into when it comes to working on the XNA stuff. :)

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Whilst it's not supported by Microsoft, it's not dead, there are ways to get it on Windows 8 even if they don't want you to (I know it's possible; I used to make XNA stuff on my spare Windows 8 laptop).

If it comes to being as dead as you say, then it's a good thing it's going to be open-source.

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It's no longer supported by Microsoft, but the open source version, MonoGame, is always being updated and ported to different platforms. And if somethings wrong with it, you can fix it yourself.

I hope too, but this hope is glimmering. MonoDevelopers are not absolutely stable. Like any low-term firm. But well. I would think dimensionally and consider your opinion.

Go for XNA.

I'm currently working on the GUI for the actual tools now. Thinking about putting TEXDEF, ANIMDEF and LVLX building all into one program, or would that be too complicated?

They will be switchable from a menu strip at the top. I'll get the first two working for now though and I will see about LVLX later.

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What ever is easiest for you to implement. :)

LVLX will obviously take the longest, so I'm doing TEXDEFs first and then ANIMDEFs next in their own editor. There's too much to LVLX to really fit it in the same program to be honest. :p

EDIT VERY LATE:

I have indeed made the tools and stuff now. In fact a while back.

The thing is I'm working to learn GL stuff to make this easier and faster (performance-wise). XNA is good, but there are a lot of parts that are too slow and the only fast ways are meant for one-off processes.

It will be a bit before work on the engine kicks off, but trust me when I say it's literally GL I'm working on.