Now's the time to try Allegro (newbie and pro alike)!

[blatant self promo]
The wonderful open source Allegro team has released version 4.0 of their lib. It is a very, very stable, cross platform lib to take advantage of full on graphical, sound, and input device support. Plugins include things like CD and MP3 functions and tying in OpenGL. It utilizes the best libs on your platform to take advantage of hardware acceleration where applicable.

In the past it has had one weakness - pain to install. Now for the release of 4.0 I've put together a graphical, point and click installer for Allegro. All you need is my download, nothing else needs to be done.

Currently supported compilers are:
Microsoft Visual C/C++
Dev-C++ (mingw and possibly cygwin)
Borland 5.5 (possibly 4.5 and higher)

Get it here!
[/blatant self promo]

Hey JustinW,

All I get is a blank screen.

AHHHh! I already have exceeded the max bandwidth for my site and it has been shut down! I still haven't finished the mirrors yet and so until I do, please feel free to email me if you would like an installer and tell me for which compiler(s). I'll e-mail it right to ya.. Sorry. [email protected]

-Justin

OK, I have another mirror up that should be working (gave it a day of testing). http://galileo.spaceports.com/~springs/

Let me know what you think. :)

BoY! i really appreciate that mirror you put up, unlike previous versions this one was rather painless to piece together

once again thanks!

Questions.

What sort of licence dose Allegro have?

I have yet to pick a library to do audio support for my applications. I have considered OpenAL, but I dont know when they will have a finished version released. Could I use allegro to do my audio for playing sfx and music?

All of the stuff i do is OpenGL in C++

Eber, Allegro is "giftware". This license is even more liberal than GNU. It basically means, it is completely yours to do with, charge with, or whatever as you please. You don't have to even give credit or admit you used it. :) (Plus with a plugin, you can use OpenGL with the Allegro functions quite seemlessly.)

Crawler, thanks a lot, glad it helped. :D

-Justin

Oh yeah, and if you'd rather not use any Allegro graphics routines, then just use OpenGL as usual and you don't need the plugin. :)

How big is the installer? I may be able to provide a mirror if need be.

Well, each individual installer is about ~3MB, but with all the options, the site takes up just over 20MB. Thanks for offering, but spaceports seems able to handle it until my pay site can get up (my ISP has to set some things up, but then I'll have a "real" site). :)

Anyway, thanks again.

-Justin

How do you get Allegro to compile under Borland c++ 4.5?

Well, I think you pretty much have to use my installer because Allegro has become pretty Borland-5.5-install specific for a couple of versions now. Where are you getting stuck, hopefully I can help.

I did use your installer. Allegro doesn't work under Borland 4.5, then?

Ok. I went and downloaded the Borland 5.5 compiler. I still get the same errors as I did with borland 4.5.

It says there's 26 errors. The command line that I'm using is:

bcc32 d:\bcc55\allegro\tests\test.c

Some of the errors say something similar to this:

Undefined symbol 'SCREEN_W' in function blit_demo

That's odd. I would use something like this to compile my allegro program from the command line using v5.5:

bcc32 -tW -5 -lc:\bcc55\bin\alleg.lib -etest.exe test.c

Making sure I had bcc32.cfg and ilink32.cfg in the directory, and where bcc55 is the path to my Borland compiler.

Actually, this should work for 4.5 as well (I have heard that it does).

Please try to compile this program (compile as Windows prog, not console):

PHP Code:

---

#include <allegro.h>

int main() 
{ 
 // Initialize Allegro.        
 allegro_init();      

 // Set the resolution to 640 by 480 with SAFE autodetection.
 set_gfx_mode(GFX_SAFE, 640, 480, 0, 0);

 // Installing the keyboard handler.
 install_keyboard();

 // Printing text to the screen.
 textout(screen, font, "Hello World!", 1, 1, 10);
 textout(screen, font, "Press ESCape to quit.", 1, 12, 11);

 // Looping until the ESCape key is pressed.
 while(! key[KEY_ESC])
   poll_keyboard(); // This shouldn't be necessary in Windows. 

 // Exit program.
 allegro_exit();
 return 0;     
}     

// Some Allegro magic to deal with WinMain().
END_OF_MAIN(); 


---

Hope you have better luck with that example. I'm going to try getting it to work with 4.5 and let you know if and how I was successful. :) Sorry, I'm not able to be online very often lately, but I'll try to respond as quickly as possible.

-Justin