Hello everyone,

I am a complete and utter newbie when it comes to programming. This sounds kind of silly coming from the mouth of a third year software engineering student but fact of the matter is, I know absolutly nothing. In the midst of all the theoritical stuff on how to optimize my algorithm and how to make sure my software is of good quality they forgot to make us practice the theory (granted I could of practiced on my own...).

Anyways, I currently bought a book on how to program games using C and the Allegro library. Being excited and extremely motivated I made it to page 55 of 500 only to get stuck in the installation! I followed every step (I think... I tried like five times...) only to fail.

I figured I could try to download the latest version of both dev-cpp and allegro but the site that contains the tutorial on how to install them doesn't exist (error 404)... See, I don't really know how libraries and dev-cpp "hold hands" and I was never able to make them work!

So... if any of you guys know a good site (for a dummy) that explains how to install both these things together and explains why things are done without skipping any steps could you please refer me to them?

Thanks a lot in advance

Seb

[edit] PS: If there are no good webpages on the subject but someone is generous enough to help me install it, that is acceptable too
I've tried on and off again to install different libraries to program games only to get stuck at the library's installation... However this time I really do want to succeed but I also want to understand why I did something!

Let me guess: Game Programming All in One, second edition?

I assume you have no problems with installing Dev-C++, as I figure it comes with a standard Windows installer. I wouldn't be able to help anyway.
To install Allegro, I believe you have several options. I think Dev-C++ has this thingy called `DevPacks' that you can use to install Allegro with, which should be easy enough to get to work.
Alternatively, I would suggest you grab a pre-compiled version from http://www.allegro.cc/files/. If you do want to install it, there should be a step-by-step guide in the documentantion that comes with Allegro (see the documentation for MinGW, since that's the compiler Dev-C++ uses).

Hey guys,

Thanks for the speedy reply. You are correct, it is in fact that book. Was it a bad choice on my part to purchase it?

Also, the book came with a cd which already had the devpaks. I did install them but when I coded the script to check whether allegro was configured right it didn't want to compile. Something about not finding some file (alle40.dll or something similar to it).

Someone mentioned in a thread that you had to write a path or something somewhere and the book also mentions this in the annexe but they never say which file to modify and what does what. That's where I got stuck.

[edit]

Well I DLed all the most recent versions and tried installing them following the intructions in the readme file of the precompiled version of allegro. After copy pasting the files in the right folders I got this compilation error.

[Linker error] undefined reference to '__gxx_personality_v0'
Id returned 1 exit status
[Build Error] [GetInfo.exe] Error 1

okays... umm in the readme it says this:

The contents of the "bin" folder (three DLLs) should be placed
somewhere in your system's PATH. Normally they are put in the
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 folder.

Now how do I put it in the system's "PATH"? Do I have to edit a file? Which one?

It seems it is an error from the Dev-C++ installation. You could try installing a newer version of Dev-C++.

Evert: don't you mean

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <allegro.h>

int main()
{

    allegro_init();
    allegro_message("Allegro version = %s\n", allegro_id);
    return 0;

}
END_OF_MAIN()

?

It's intentional. END_OF_MAIN() is a macro expanding to a function, like this:

int foo()
{

}

So any semicolon will just be tacked on after the brace, which is superfluous.