Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/04/12/10:25:00
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.
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