Message-Id: <199901042034.PAA10700@delorie.com> Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 19:07:50 +0000 To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com, allegro AT mail DOT canvaslink DOT com From: Shawn Hargreaves Subject: Announce: Allegro 3.1 Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com A final release version of Allegro 3.1 is now available from the SimTel archives, in the directory v2tk/allegro/, filename alleg31.zip. The FreeBE/AF video drivers have been uploaded to the same location, in the files freebb10.zip (binaries) and freebs10.zip (sources), or if you prefer to go on using the old statically linked hardware drivers in the same way as with previous versions of Allegro, these are available in the vdrv.zip addon module. This upload is very similar to the beta release from a few weeks ago, the only differences being some bugfixes and the addition of a Swiss keyboard mapping and German message translation. If you have previously installed the beta release, a small (22k) upgrade patch can be downloaded from http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/al31bd.zip. Warning: don't try to install Allegro 3.1 directly over the top of an existing Allegro 3.0 system: this can cause no end of problems with old files being left in your compiler directories. You should start by deleting allegro.h from djgpp/include and liballeg.a from djgpp/lib, and then unzip Allegro 3.1 from scratch into a clean directory, after either deleting or renaming your previous copy. ---------------------------------------------------------------- The complete ChangeLog since Allegro 3.0 is far too long to post here: see http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/changes.html. To summarise: Full support for VBE/AF hardware accelerated graphics. Can take advantage of VBE 3.0 features (triple buffering). Video bitmap functions for organising offscreen vram. Supports stereo samples. Sound input routines (MIDI and sampled sound). True 16 bit interpolated sample mixing, with up to 64 channels. Driver for ESS AudioDrive soundcards. New joystick driver system and more flexible API. Drivers for Sidewinder, Gravis GamePad Pro, and SNES joypad. Better polygon routines (hicolor, truecolor, MMX optimisation). Improved localisation support (keyboard mappings and translation). Plugin architecture makes it easy to customise the grabber tools. Added RTF docs, a new help.txt file, cross-references in the Info docs. Five new example programs. Many other portability improvements and bug fixes. -- Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/ "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." - Frank Zappa