I just noticed that the source to Allegro has been posted by HitMan on OS4Depot. Some time back there was some interest in getting it ported to MorphOS but the bounty went only as far as getting it on OS4. I've looked at the source and it looks plausible to port but since most of the software that uses it is closed-source we might not get many ports out of it. If anybody is still interested I might have a go at it.

Were any software using Allegro ported to OS4 or is there anything useful that could be ported using Allegro?

Having Allegro wouldnt hurt but it should be ported as a shared library. If you choose to do so I can help with library structure which are not so well known to the public.

> Were any software using Allegro ported to OS4 [...]?

Entering "allegro" text string into 'Text' field of http://os4depot.net/index.php?function=modules/sql/search results in 49 archives found (with surely some false positives among them).

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While I agree that a shared library is more "clean" and generally better, I don't think there's THAT much point, when the amount of software is really low...

I have found 2 allegro projects which I consider "would be really nice to have", and curiously enough, both of them happen to be Head over Heels remakes

http://www.headoverheels2.com/drupal/downloads
and
http://retrospec.sgn.net/games/hoh/


Second is way better but closed source. Long ago I actually contacted the developer, and he clearly wasn't againist porting it to MorphOS, but said that it was using Allegro (which we didn't have, and couldn't port because of that), but he was in progress of rewriting the game with SDL instead, and told he would contact me when he's got it working. Probably he's been busy with other things then...

How about the AGS engine? If you like 2D point and click adventures, it's the next best thing to ScummVM.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games

@Itix

I was thinking that a true shared library would be good also. Doing so would require a two-pass process. The first pass to generate the header using the C preprocessor only, and the second pass to actually implement the code. (The Allegro sources use preprocessor macros to generate the jump-table on the original MSDOS version.)

@thread

Also of note, I would want to write the AROS version first and port from there. I can use VirtualBox on my Intel Mac Mini to do parallel builds to speed up my compiling. I can make a cross-platform version after that.

@BSzili:
Yes! I'd really like to see this port!
Are you going to be the one who will start to port this adventure engine?
=)

If no one else wants to port AGS, then I'm interested in taking up the task, when the Allegro port is ready.

@SamuraiCrow

Did you port it already? I took a look at source code and looks like MorphOS port is easy peasy. If you havent started working on it I could port it this weekend maybe but I dont want to do duplicate work.

What version are they up to?

Allegro 4.2.1 it seems. It is already compiling on morphos without joysticks support which needs rewrite with sensors API.

http://itix.amiga-projects.net/Allegro/AllegroMorphOS.lha

I just got this to build and no time to test it now. I try to do that on Sunday. If not, it must wait another week.

Currently it has missing joystick support and when I have tested this thing works I am going to convert this thing to a shared library. If someone else has started porting this source code is there so he can compare what changes I have made. My port is almost identical to the original OS4 port.

Allegro.png

I am now going to prepare first archives to Aminet.

Known issues:
* 16-bit gfx look wrong on most systems

It is PITA to support 16-bit modes when CGX has no functions to draw 16-bit pixel arrays. I maybe look at this later.

Building a shared library is under investigation. I dont know if Allegro is suitable to that and extracting jump table is boring as ever.

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Its a nice great first release though. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

This game engine and it's toolkit look very nice and have been recently open sourced under an MIT licence.

It would be good to see it on MorphOS one day.

http://www.godotengine.org

Do this engine use Allegro?

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Not as far as I know, I just posted it here to save creating a separate thread.

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That is a cool engine! I just tested it out on the Mac. Its very similar to Allegro only a bit more advanced I think.

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Took a really quick look, and it seems to at least support shaders. If it does, it's quite likely that they're also required. If this is the case, we can forget it for now.

Keep in mind that neither Allegro nor SDL are game engines. They are libraries which are meant to make writing engines easier by having a couple of ready-made solutions for common tasks, and providing a uniform API across different platforms.

This is great news! My idea to make a shared library version of Allegro was to make a utility based on a C parser that would extract the macros that generate the DLL export function on Windows and generate an FD file or some such.

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It seems that Allegro is exporting number of globals which makes shared library quite complicated. It would have to be implemented as dual shared/link library but due to relatively low numbers of software options and EOL development it doesnt make sense.

Thanks for the tip. AROS 68k is already slated to use such a dual-library setup since it is AROS ABI v1. I was planning on writing an AROS version before I would've gotten around to setting up another MorphOS box (Mine died).

As for EOL, my interest is not so generally about Allegro games, but rather is about getting AllegroGL to work on AGA which is also EOL.

I understand that :) I was thinking hard about shared library but could not find enough motivation. Writing function description (#?.fd) files is the most boring part.

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Oh well, never mind then. Maybe the AROS guys will port it to their OS at some point.