Exactly four years after the release of Allegro 3.0 for DOS, the team announced the release of a new major version, Allegro 4.0. This release is a very important step in Allegro’s development; 4.0 officially brings multi-platform support and it is now very stable. Allegro is a game library distributed freely, supporting the following platforms: DOS, Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris), Windows, and BeOS (MacOS and QNX ports are in alpha stage).
Allegro 4.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Hi,
could someone bring me up to date as to what the relevance of Allegro is? I think I remember it from the DOS days. How does it compare to other open cross-platform libraries such as SDL? Does the 4.0 release that we will soon see lots of old DOS games ported to Linux? That would be great.
I have http://www.bebits.com/devprofile/1716>already “lots of old DOS games” to BeOS already. Easily.
The Linux porting should be as trivial.
The biggest problem when porting Allegro games is that these DOS/Windows programmers do not care about case sensitivity, so you end up doing data entry to change the case of their source filenames, to the ones that correspond from the makefiles or the header files. Other than that, it is pretty easy to port games written in Allegro.
First of all thanks to Eugenia for posting this new as I wasn’t around these last days and I didn’t warn her about the release.
Now, the main differences between Allegro and SDL are:
– The Allegro API is much easier than the SDL one
– Input/system events are handled automatically for you and you don’t have to create an events pump
– A lot of features are integrated into the library; almost everything you need to create a great game is already there, and if there’s something missing (for example an OpenGL driver) there are many add-ons.
– Under Linux there are many console gfx drivers (VGA/modeX, SVGAlib, fbcon), so your games will run also without X, whereas SDL games require it.
Basically SDL gives you the basic things to play with; Allegro gives you the basics and much more, but it supports a couple less platforms that SDL (MacOS/QNX support is alpha and Amiga is not supported)… It is up to you to choose the right lib depending on your needs.
I’m surprised that nobody’s put a filesystem adaptor into any of these cross-platform libraries to handle the case sensitive/insensitive issue automagically; it’s one of the first things I would’ve done if DOS/Windows was one of the target platforms.
Is Mac OS 9 case-sensitive? What about OS X?
– chrish
is it an all inclusive set of tools like directX? can it do 3d? etc.
if it can compete with DirectX then perhaps people may begin to make their games using this rather than DirectX and games can then be ported in a week rather than a year or so.
“I’m surprised that nobody’s put a filesystem adaptor into any of these cross-platform libraries to handle the case sensitive/insensitive issue automagically; it’s one of the first things I would’ve done if DOS/Windows was one of the target platforms. ”
I’m amazed so many C/C++ programmers actually make the case insensitive mistakes in the first place. Perhaps we should start forcing programmers to enable case sensitivity in Win2k/XP, or at least test the software in a case sensitive environment.
Hi,
Angelo says : …Amiga is not supported)… It is up to you to choose the right lib depending on your needs.
I’d like to choose the Amiga but you’re saying that its not supported
Do you plan to support it in the future or not at all (ie a SDL port exist on the Amiga)
Thanks
Kamel
hmm… This story’s news ID in our database is number “400” and the official Allegro version is called 4.0.0. Fate?
SEAL 2.x and 1.x as well as many other up and coming FREEDOS
GUIs are being built with the Allegro library\toolkit.