Uh ... to begin with, it uses DirectX 3 functions, not 1. And there's more to it than this. I'm not the right person for telling you about this, though. Someone with more sk177z will come along and post shortly, I'm sure ...

Who said it was so god damn slow under Windows anyway? I get quite excellent frame rates, thank you very much.

Uhh... cough*wrong*cough

At least, I'm pretty sure that that isn't true. Or is it? Care to clarify a poor, confused soul?

If you want speed, just use AllegroGL or whatever it was. In fact, just use openGL. Anyhow, I haven't had any speed problems so far. If your computer has a speed concern, it shouldn't be running above DX3 anyways.

Quite a bit, actually.

You can get hardware-accelerated trans blitting, which you don't get from DirectDraw.

What is wrong with those people? Are they so backwards that they can't comprehend that the GL driver, not only makes sense, but it makes Allegro far more useful and fast?

As it stands now, there is no way to get hardware accelerated blended blits, even though hardware as old as the Voodoo1 allows it. And, TNT1's and better support GL, while still allowing for hardware blended blitting.

Do they just want Allegro to be some kind of learning toy for low-end programmers who haven't graduated to something that provides real power (or who are stuck on low-end computers)? Or do they want Allegro to be the preferred 2D game API?

Korval: I don't know if you've seen the latest version of AllegroGL (or the CVS one), but the driver is very very incomplete. As such, it's not very useful to integrate it into Allegro at this point in time.

Miquel: Nowhere has anyone mentioned 3D. OpenGL (or even D3D) does not imply that 3D feature would be used.

Unfortunately, this is completely incompatible with Allegro's (current, and IMO severly broken) blending system. Better left as an add-on for now.

Is there documentation, or some sort of guide on how to write new drivers anywhere? I ask this from time to time, and there wasn't last time I asked, but...

Perhaps the way that Allegro doesn't expose much terribly useful information about its hardware targets puts the developers off OpenGL because its thinking regarding such things as knowing the internal format of the frame buffer and such like is so radically different to the other targets.

Relevantly to this forum, I still vote in favour of Allegro 5 being given bitmap creation functions which allow users to pass hints about what they want to do with the surfaces (blitting, pixel painting, etc) rather than directly assuming that memory bitmaps are fastest for blitting, system bitmaps (if available) are a compromise and that memory bitmaps are best for pixel painting. Or whatever you chose to assume.

The voodoo1 supports GL! Although the official drivers have a broken glPolygonOffset and MESA has broken quad strips when using compiled vertex arrays.

DX1?? Isn't that from the Windows 3.11 era??
Haha.
The reason it is slow is because it is designed as a platform independent, high level development library. It is not fitted either toward game programming or applicatin development. It is meant to work out basic output and input functionality available on most video cards dating back to like 97 (haha be4 the GHz processor era if I'm not mistaken).
If u don't like allegro, or feel it doesn't fit your needs, u could try AllegroGL (which is geared more toward 3D design). And, if that's no good, then instead of complaining, maybe u could try writing an extention of Allegro to allow nicer video functionality.
It's free, it works, and it's well documented. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

-- CM

I said direct draw 1.0 specifcations for video cards, which arent accelarted nearly as much as doing 2d on d3d(even faster using pixel shaders which AMD/Intel are releasing thereown versions of soon for there CPU's)

Everything beyond blitting (and possibly that to) will defiantly be executed faster... much faster on nice cards.

Writing a driver for it i suppose is completely possible... although i agree with Bob i really dont like allegros blender routines (havent looked at fblend but if the designs anything like it i wont like it)

I dunno theres alot of other things i dont like about allegro to is why im leaving (not trying to be rude or nothing just stating some things maybe to be changed,or not) I dont like C. It would be so much nicer to have everythign self contained in C++, use more callback functions and such. I guess i could again write a wrapper but its alot of work for something that needs its display driver updated to:P

I cant post any benchmarks allegro doesnt work with my video card(ati radeon 9000 pro,dx9,using ati catalyst drivers),and i removed all my programming shit from my other computer

There's a proof for that. Eiffel is a completely OOP language (even more than C++), and the Eiffel compiler just generates plain C code, so OO can be done with pure C.

The only difference is that C++ does a lot of things for you. You never know, maybe there's some kind of library out there that helps doing oop with C.