History
Initially standing for Atari Low-Level Game Routines, Allegro was originally created by Shawn Hargreaves for the Atari ST in the early 1990s. However, Shawn abandoned the Atari version as he realized the platform was dying, and reimplemented his work for the Borland C++ and DJGPP compilers in 1995. Support for Borland C++ was dropped in version 2.0, and DJGPP was the only supported compiler. As DJGPP was a DOS compiler, all games which used Allegro therefore used DOS. Around 1998, Allegro branched out into several versions. A port to Microsoft Windows, WinAllegro, was created, and also during this time, a Unix port of Allegro, XwinAllegro, was created. These various ports were brought together during the Allegro 3.9 WIP versions, with Allegro 4.0 being the first stable version of Allegro to support multiple platforms. The current version of Allegro supports Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows (MSVC, MinGW, Cygwin, Borland C++), Mac OS X and, up to the 4.2 version, BeOS, QNX, and DOS (DJGPP, Watcom). An iPhone port is being developed too. Shawn Hargreaves is no longer involved with Allegro.
For hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics on Linux, Mac OS X and DOS, AllegroGL and OpenLayer are available. They are two add-on libraries that use OpenGL for accelerated graphics routines and use Allegro for all other gaming needs. Note that, combined with Glide and MesaFX (using 3dfx hardware), AllegroGL is one of the few available opensource solutions for hardware accelerated 3D under DOS.
Read more about this topic: Allegro (software)
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