Yes, see the Allegro 5 manual. You'll need to initialize the image addon before you can load bitmaps though. Use al_init_image_addon to do this.

Well, with Allegro 5 you're going to have some trouble doing that. You can either load the whole thing as a memory bitmap, which will be really slow to draw, or you can turn it into a grid of video bitmaps and then draw the appropriate sectors as you need them, which is annoying.

Ok, so I dont want to use another engine as im trying to learn allegro from the bottom up before moving on to other things. I have loading and displaying bitmaps working now so im thinking i'll have to use some method like tiling bitmaps for my background.
So additional question. If I have a bitmap of a starfield which can tile seamlessly, would it just be a matter of checking the tiles near the edges and clipping appropriately? It seems to me that if I do something like that I could fly around indefinitely and just keep tiling my star background to give the illusion of motion? Does that make any sense as an approach?
Once again, any advice is much appreciated!

Thanks guys. Thats a great example, any links or documents that expand on that kind of thing would be great.
The one thing I don't understand in that example is the y=-(camera_y%texture_height)

I see whats going on but I'm not sure why it works. Also I know that y-= means
y = y- but what does the y=- within the for loop mean? Thanks again.. lots to learn!

Thanks! This has been unbelievably helpful. I've got a scrolling star background now. Though its obvious looking at it that I'm only using one tile. This should still work if I have an array of tiles and a map structure to keep track of how the tiles are distributed in the world right? I just find out which tiles to draw based on where the viewscreen is on the world grid?

The one other thing is that I seem to be having a slight problem where i see a line moving vertically up along the screen whenever there's movement. I thought allegro automatically waited for vertical re-synch so Im not sure if thats the problem.

Your universe can be really large, but the background doesn't need to be that size. The best way would be to have a black background, then have individual images like planets, galaxies, stars etc... loaded in as the player moves.

You could store the positions of the planets for example then display them if they move into the player's view. You could store the center position of an image, then check if it's boundries (checking width and height) fall inside the players view then blitting it to screen as needed. In this way you could have your universe just about as large as you could imagine.

Another method would be to tile space. If your individual tiles were say 64x64 pixels in size, your map array would be roughly 188 x 140 (or 12032 x 8960 pixels). For images larger than 64x64 you just divide them up into 64x64 chunks and display them that way. Or make the tile sizes larger of course. This could also make detecting where you are simple enough, if certain map locations contain a planet, than if your ship flies into tile location, you land on it (or collide).

Edit: For images larger than 64x64, say a 128x128 image, you could mark the four map locations that would hold this image as containing it, then draw the upper left corner of the image in the upper left corner of the first map position (no dividing of images).

Good luck with your game.

Try changing the settings in your graphics driver to either 'use vsync' or 'use application vsync setting'.

If that doesn't work, then use al_set_new_display_option(ALLEGRO_VSYNC , 1 , ALLEGRO_SUGGEST); and see if that works.