Memblers wrote:
now that I've gotten comfortable with C, I've found it easy to start by using a library such as
SDL.
I used to prefer Allegro over SDL for 1. MS-DOS compatibility (before I switched to NT) and 2. all the convenience functions. But since then, Allegro doesn't appear to be maintained as closely as SDL; look at the broken Allegro packages in Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04 that don't work with PulseAudio. (SDL is in "main", the part of Ubuntu that Canonical engineers are paid to oversee; Allegro is in "universe", the community-maintained part.) There were also problems with getting Allegro to compile in XCode 3.2 around this time last year due to lack of QuickDraw headers.
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But yeah it's a lot more work not having the benefit of any kind of 2D graphics hardware. So you pretty much 'emulating' your own graphics system into a huge bitmap.
Just like a Williams arcade board, or an Atari Lynx, or any other framebuffer-based 2D platform.
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And no 'soundchip', so your audio routines need to be as fast as possible (for an action game or similar).
Speed for a sound engine isn't as strict as it used to be in the days of i486SX and MS-DOS. I'm in the middle of writing a replacement for SDL_mixer that 1. adds pitch control as a standard feature (as in Allegro) and 2. makes it easier to use synthesizers, decompressors, and other audio sources other than wave files (as in Allegro), though it gives up a little bit of speed for playing wave files because the wave reader is implemented as a synth. (
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