Game Development Info - Part 1

 
What's Allegro?

Well, if you're reading this pages you're probably bored, or you're looking for some programming information related to Allegro, a kick-ass game programming library designed to run in multiple platforms.

Programming games is a very troublesome task. Not only you have to worry about the actual runnings of your game, but you'll have to worry about programming graphics, sounds, input devices and all that. What Allegro does is it offers a library of functions that takes care of all the low-level graphics, sounds and stuff so that you won't have to reinvent the wheel and concentrate on the more important aspects of developing your game.

Allegro allows you to compile programs in a variety of OS platforms, including DOS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000? (using DirectX), Linux, BeOS etc. You can easily port your code from one platform to another.


What's DJGPP?

DJGPP is closely related to Allegro; in fact, you'll need it during the installation process. DJGPP is a free 32-bit C/C++ Compiler that allows you to compile DOS programs that utilizes memory beyond the 640k base memory that DOS offers (don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about). It's been around for a long time, and as far as I know it's probably the best you can get.

In the next section, we'll talk about what is needed to install these kick-ass tools. Please note that I can only show you how it's done in DOS and Windows; I haven't played around in Linux long enough :-(

 
Proceed to the next step: Installing the files