From: mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk (George Foot)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Future of Allegro
Date: 19 Nov 1996 08:23:40 GMT
Organization: Oxford University, England
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Message-ID: <56rqqc$sji@news.ox.ac.uk>
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Kevin Baca (kbaca AT skygames DOT com) wrote:
: George Foot wrote:
: > 
: > Kevin Baca (kbaca AT skygames DOT com) wrote:
: > : Is there any demand for a port to Win95/NT?
: > 
: > That's nothing to do with Allegro... read the threads on RSXNTDJ's
: > capabilities, check out what Cygnus are up to, etc. It's more to do with
: > DJGPP that Allegro. Maybe when there is a fully functional port to
: > Win95/NT of DJGPP, a graphics library compatible with Allegro will be a
: > good idea.

: Porting DJGPP has nothing to do with whether Allegro can be useful under
: Win95/NT.  Allegro was designed in such a fashion that it can easily be
: made OS independent, and therefore it doesn't necessarily need to be
: tied to DJGPP.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood your posting, but you seem to have 
misunderstood mine, too. What I'm saying is that maybe a port of Allegro 
will be useful, but it can't come into being until there is a decent 
compiler to use it with.

: If you've used DirectX at all you would know that there is still a good
: amount of complexity that must be overcome to get any real work done. 
: Allegro is simple and small enough to provide a good layer between
: DirectX and a game so that the hardware side of game programming becomes
: simpler without adding significant overhead.

No, I haven't used DirectX, but I now see what you meant in your first 
posting. You seem to be proposing a version of Allegro which runs under 
Win95/NT using DirectX, but compiled on a different compiler. Am I correct?

You didn't actually mention DirectX anywhere in your original post, so I 
assumed you meant for Windows programming in general, where a large 
number of Allegro functions are indeed redundant because the Windows GUI 
has these built in. Examples are pretty much the entire graphics library, 
the timing routines, everything to do with mouse, keyboard, ...

: Although Win95/NT/DirectX discussions may be inappropriate to this
: group, this is the group with the most Allegro traffic, and therefore
: the original post seemed appropriate.

As I said, I personally don't think it's really appropriate until there's 
a good, solid, reliable port to Win95 of DJGPP.

I apologize if my reply was inappropriate.

--
George Foot

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