From: Shawn Hargreaves Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: AllegroX project? Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 13:18:19 +0100 Organization: None Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <5ina4e$1qmc AT elmo DOT cadvision DOT com> NNTP-Posting-Host: talula.demon.co.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Lines: 40 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Calvin French writes: >Awhile back I made a suggestion (which was probably shot down, don't >rightly recall, you see) to add DirectX support to Allegro. This seems >like an unbelievably good idea to me, here's why: I certainly would like to see a DirectX version of Allegro. Although there is a lot of overlap between the two, Allegro would add a lot of things that DirectX doesn't already handle, and would also be useful as a more sane API on top of the existing DirectX routines (ok, I admit that I'm biased in favour of the Allegro API, but DirectX is hardly easy to get to grips with :-) >1) Eliminates the need for game developers to use Windows altogether. >DJGPP is already 32-bit, now if we can use DirectX drivers (which >every accellerated video board on the planet will ship with) there is >no advantage to coding in Windows. Is that really possible? I don't know enough about the internals of Windows and DirectX to say for sure, but I would have imagined the DirectX drivers would be quite closely tied into the Win32 API, so using them from a DOS program would be rather tricky :-) It would be fantastic if it was possible, but I'm sceptical: can you really write a program that runs under, say, cwsdpmi, but calls DirectX video functions? My thinking was more along the lines of a Windows port of Allegro, rather than trying to use DirectX in the djgpp version. I'd be reluctant to switch to a compiler like Watcom or MSVC, though, partly because I don't like them very much but mainly because that would require rewrites of all the AT&T asm code. A much nicer option would be a good, stable, Windows version of gcc, which seems to be lacking at the moment... I'd love to have such a port, and at some point in the future I may well want to work on it myself, but it isn't something I have time for at the moment. Don't let that stop you, though: in my experience things only happen when someone sits down and makes them be so... -- Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/ Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament.