Hello everybody,

Me introducing myself (you can skip it as it is boring, probably) :

I'm new here so I wish to introduce myself a little bit ...
My name is Alex, I'm from France, I love music and keyboards a lot, and I used to enjoy C programming a lot when I was younger ... That was 25 years ago ... And I used Allegro at this time -_- Then I never did any coding for the past 25 years ... Right now I'm doing a software for my synthesizer, some audio conversion stuff, but I went to a point when the dos command line is not enough anymore, so I remembered how great and easy was Allegro !

My question :

I'm coding on Windows 8 and I'm using MingW32, the last version. Yesterday it was a huuuuuge pain is the *** to make Allegro working. I don't even talk about compiling it, I was completely out of luck and I gave up.
No problem, I installed a binary of the 4.4 (or so...) version, and now it's working.

Now something's really weird happens. Every example codes that I try don't work until I change a single thing :
The original code is :

if (allegro_init() != 0)
return 1;

This make the compiled code not working, nothing happen when I launch it.

Then if I change the condition from != to == , the code launches perfectly ...

I don't get it, is it some kind of compatibility issue ?
Just the same with every pieces of examples available from the website ...

Thanks for the help
Alex

PS : I would like to use the ADIME dialogs/gui library, once again I have no luck compiling it I'm really not a nerd. Is there any binary versions of it for windows available ? Or any other similar libraries, already compiled and that looked more or less like windows ?

Yes indeed - Allegro 5's al_init returns FALSE if there's a problem.

I always found A4's install_* functions to to be unintuitive, because things like create_bitmap were truthy when they succeeded. So, I normally wrote the conditions like this:

if(allegro_init() != 0)
    throw_a_big_error();

if(install_keyboard() != 0)
    throw_another_error();

hello @alex alex , welcome to Allegro!

You can give yourself a good introduction in the offtopic forum or even fill out your profile.

About of allegro_init() : https://liballeg.org/stabledocs/en/alleg000.html#install_allegro

You can see that it returns 0 if it works correctly, which if it returns any value there was an error. Modify != To == can continue, but this will lead to more errors.

You also don't seem to make it clear that you're using Allegro 5 at any point.

If you want to continue programming with Allegro 4 you have djgpp.

You can found documentations for both libraries here:

Allegro 4: https://liballeg.org/stabledocs/en/allegro.html
Allegro 5: https://liballeg.org/a5docs/trunk/

Examples of Allegro 5 here:

https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/tree/master/examples

More info here:

https://liballeg.org/

If you have any problem, do not hesitate to ask.

If allegro_init doesn't return 0, it means the library failed to install. This typically happens when the runtime library version doesn't match the compiled version of allegro. It means you have bad dlls somewhere.

Thank you RmBeer2 for the answer. I'm having a look at the extremely well done tutorials provided in your post. Such a huge step from the last time I used Allegro, it was in the early 90's if I remember well ... I made a gameboy emulator at this time with the help of the library, there was a nice visual debugger, it was pure fun. Of course I used DJGPP at this time.

Now, Mingw seems to work perfectly for what I do. I started my new audio software with it, it was supposed to work on the line command only, but as it grows, I need a Gui now.

I didn't install Allegro 5. I really tried. Some examples worked, while some others didn't. While they compiled with no error, they had windows give me an error at launch. My tries to compile the fifth installment were a true nightmare. You're supposed to know so much in order to do it successfully, and seriously I just wanted to progress in my coding.

As far as I can remember, I installed Allegro 4.4, an already compiled version. At the exception of the allegro init condition, every examples now work perfectly, how would it be possible that the library didn't install properly ?
Well perhaps because I installed Allegro 4.0 first, then added the Allegro 4.2 files over it, then the 4.4 ... ahaha, it's a little bit messy but it does the job for my needs.

True only for 32 bit windows, right? How many people are still using 32 bit OS'es?

AFAIK 64bit OSes are not able to run 32bit DOS programs.
(Should be possible under DOSbox though, but I've never had much luck with that)

It's the 16 bit startup stub that Windows trips over, I know from experience.

I was talking in general, but yes, you're right: DOSbox or something.

Why you didn't have luck with that? DOSbox is quite straightforward.

I second Mayor Reynalda there, minGW-w64 is quite nice and very actively supported. Vainilla MinGW seems to be kinda abandoned nowadays.

DOSbox won't allow instructions that were implemented after the 486.

http://members.allegro.cc/EdgarReynaldo/BuildA4.html
http://members.allegro.cc/EdgarReynaldo/BuildA5.html