Allegro library |
The Allegro library is a free video game software library, with functions for 2-dimensional imaging, basic audio, input, timers, and fixed-point and floating-point matrix (math) arithmetic. As of version 4.0, programs that use the library work on DOS, Microsoft Windows, BeOS, Mac OS X, and various UNIX systems with (or without) X Window System, abstracting their application programming interfaces into one portable interface.
The library is written in the C programming language and designed to be used with C programming language or C plus plus. Complete API documentation is available from the [http://alleg.sourceforge.net/ official website].
The library comes with full source code and is open source, using a simple permissive license which allows copying, modification and distribution for any purpose. Along with the source code, it comes with countless examples, so that even someone with hardly any video game programming knowledge can study the examples and come up with a simple video game in no time flat.
The community of Allegro users have contributed several library extensions to handle scrolling tile maps, import and export various file formats, and even connect to OpenGL.
=History Of Allegro=
Allegro was originally created by Shawn Hargreaves for the DJGPP compiler during the 1990 s. DJGPP was a DOS compiler so all games which used Allegro (when Allegro originally came out) used DOS. Around 1998, Allegro branched out into several branches. There was the Allegro branch which was for programming games for DOS using DJGPP, in 1998, WinAllegro was created, also during this time, XwinAllegro was created. WinAllegro was the Windows branch of Allegro & XwinAllegro was the Unix (X-Windows) branch of Allegro. Nowadays, there are no more branches of Allegro. You can now download the source code & build Allegro for Windows, Linux, DOS, et al from the same source code. Allegro became open source several years ago & Shawn Hargreaves is no longer involved with Allegro anymore.
The current version of Allegro is 4.2.0RC2. Most of the code was rewritten in the past years in a separate development branch, and 4.2.0 will be the final release with the old code base. After that, releases on the development branch will include the new code and also an new, much cleaned up API (optional, there s full backwards compatibility provided by an extra API layer emulating the old API).
=Comparison to other libraries=
There are many other free libraries with overlapping functionality to Allegro around, the closest one in functionality is SDL aka Simple DirectMedia Layer. Allegro is older than SDL, but SDL has a simpler API and is in more widespread use. Both Allegro and SDL work under systems such as Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows, QNX, BeOS and MacOS X. Additionally, Allegro works under DOS, while SDL works on MacOS Classic and Amiga. SDL also has been ported to console game systems/handheld game systems such as PS2, XBOX, Dreamcast, GP32, et al.
For both, numerous bindings to several other languages besides C exist.
=Various games using Allegro:=
*Icy Tower *UFO2000 *Zelda Classic *Kraptor *KBall
*Gusanos=See also=
*Simple DirectMedia Layer *AllegroGL *DirectX *OpenGL *ClanLib *OpenML
= External links =
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