On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 23:17 +0530, Pradeepto Bhattacharya wrote:
Roshan dude, this feels like deja-vu or something to me.Many years ago, I was searching for a lib that could do "1024x800" or atleast "800x600" since I could never get TC++ graphics.lib/drivers to work at higher than 640x480. And I wanted to create some GUI foo for some trivial civil engineering software that I had written so that 2nd year CE students didnot have to do some thousand calculations :P. First version was using gotoxy, next one using BGI. But then 640x480 really sucked after a point.
wow :)
I started searching for svga and what not. I used to berunning Win98 those days btw. So I bumped into two libraries - Zephyr and Allegro ( * ). Both could do what I wanted - nice gfx routines in svga. Allegro is a Game Programming Lib. Allegro was more community based and had GUI routines even. I fell in love with it. It was/is a "giftware" started as a hobby project by a dude called Shawn Hargreaves (typo?). He was the Linus for us Allegro fanboys. SDL was BSD for us, we loved to make fun of it :P.
wow wow :P
Anyways, I stuck with Allegro for a long long time. I learnta lot while using it. I learnt that TC++ was the not the only compiler in the world, since Allegro needed something called DJGPP which apparently was a DOS port of some random compiler called gcc :O. Also learnt that there was something called MingW - Windows port of gcc. My Civil Engg. software was re-done using Allegro.
The best part about Allegro was its community. There is thisforum site, www.allegro.cc. Loads of helpful people there. For a long
totally agreed :P
one of the reasons I completely moved to Linux was allegro. I worked with allegro for some time on windows but then when the new version came out, it wouldn't compile. I tried tried tried and then simply got fed up. Rebooted my machine in Redhat 9 and tried compiling. Bam! It compiled flawlessly :) Along with allegro, I used this TTF library whose name I can't remember now :(
Anyway, 'twas a long time ago! :)