Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/09/06/13:48:25
Damian Yerrick writes:
>> Future versions of Allegro will support Unicode, using UTF8 text
>> encoding by default, but can be set to work with fixed size 8 bit
>> or 16 bit characters. You can get this code in the
>
> So how will I load a 16-bit font? 8-bit fonts are already huge
> enough, and now we'll all be making them 256 times bigger?
It's a sparse font format, so you only include the character ranges
that you are actually interested in using. Download the latest WIP
code and try it out: the grabber has lots of functions for creating
and manipulating multi-range fonts.
> I don't know why some fellows put down Allegro on this NG; it's
> completely illogical.
Different people have different needs, and will like different things.
Also, some people just enjoy being illogical every now and then :-)
Personally I don't care very much: I've never particularly tried to
advertise Allegro, and it's not going to offend me if some people
don't like it. Plenty of people do enjoy using it, and that's enough
to make it a worthwhile thing to develop...
> Anyone know how to port an Allegro game to Macintosh? (I want
> to turn DOSArena into MacArena.)
At least from my point of view, the nicest way would be to do a Mac
port of Allegro. That is probably rather more work than just
converting your code to use some other Mac-specific libs (I don't
know enough about the Mac to comment on what is available there),
but once you ported Allegro, lots of other software would then be
usable there pretty much for free. The current WIP code already
gives almost 100% source level compatibility between DOS (djgpp
and Watcom), Windows, and Linux, with BeOS support on the way, and
it would be very cool to add some Mac code as well. If you are
interested in this, grab the latest code and have a look around:
it has been very heavily reorganised since the 3.1 versions, so
although you would of course have to write Mac-specific versions
of all the hardware and OS access functions, a majority of the code
is now entirely portable and kept separate from the machine
dependent parts. Most relevantly for you, it no longer depends on
any gcc-isms, and there are C alternatives to all the asm drawing
code, so at least some things that don't do any hardware access
(like the dat archiver utility) should build pretty much out of
the box...
Shawn Hargreaves.
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