That stands for "Allegro Mini-Game Collection"

A while ago CGamesPlay had this brilliant idea of making a nice little framework you could plug simple games into. Not many games were developed for that "platform" but I thought it was a good idea so I decided to revive it. I wrote a simple framework program that does things like provide a main loop, gives you double buffering, timer control, high score handling, etc. It even loads and runs games that are compiled as DLLs. All you need to do is implement the game interface, compile a DLL and plug it in. No need even to recompile the program.

Here I'd like to ask for your help:

1. Write games! Simple mini-games I mean. In the src/games directory is a file called template.cpp. You just need to rename it to something unique and implement the Init(), Deinit(), Logic() and Draw() methods (and perhaps a few more). Then compile it into a DLL (a makefile for MinGW is included) and put it in the games directory. Post it here too for others to enjoy. This isn't a contest, more like a fun community project, like the 20line game thread See who can make the best little mini-game

2. Help me improve the program. What can be added? What doesn't work? (read readme.txt before you say fullscreen mode because I know about that) What can be improved and how?

3. Help me make the program work on platforms other than Windows. All I need is the equivalent of dynamically loadable DLLs on Linux. I know a lot of people here are Linux gurus but I am not, so I can't do it myself.

Screenshot:
http://ferisrv5.uni-mb.si/~ma0747/graphics/screen_amgc2.png

Link: The official AMGC2 page

You can download the main program (both Windows binary and Linux tested source) as well as some game plugins there.

Here's also the project page on the a.cc depot: AMGC2 on the depot. Feel free to post a review.

I like it. I'll probably make some stuff for this. Now I can finally make something of all those little unfinished projects... I'll just convert them into mini games

Why not just use threads or spawn off a game directly from any executable? Anyway sounds like a good idea.

Pretty slick, I might have a go at writing an allegro applet...

Oh, and kick crashed on me too, I started it about 3 times in a row and it gave me a black window. I couldn't reproduce it though.

edit; and you could organize an 'allegro minigame competition', that would be fun....

Interested, but too busy. Schedule should free up in about a month and then maybe. I'll at least check out the program and give you some feedback.

Nice idea, but but... You will need to compile the minigames on all platforms separately, which kind of takes the fun out of it.

Yeah, that much I could guess. But how do you dynamically load a .so programmatically?

Well, at least it's an improvement from the first AGC where the whole program needed to be recompiled when you wanted to plug in a new game. Sort of like the grabber plugins.

Before I went the DLL way I was also thinking about making a sort of a simple Allegro basic-like scripting language that the host program would interpret. But then I though this would be too limiting, plus it would be very difficult to do. Although on the other hand, that might not be such a bad idea. I mean I tend to have most fun when I have limited resources. Like for example that 20line contest a couple of years ago was extremely fun

The Frogger clone is just a few copy&paste operations away

This would be cool and if you used spidermonkey/javascript plus marcello's jsgen it'd be a 'no-brainer'.

This was the idea behind my failed 'javascript game console' project only difference was that jsgc would have allowed you to script applet games with javascript.

The idea is nice, like I said. But now that I saw that it's a windows program, I'm kind of not so interested in it. Just my feelings after seeing the source.

Porting it isn't going to be nice, well at least not my cup of tea. Theres no good portable way of creating this kind of program. Except that wxwindows is trying to make a good job on it. It's also in c++, which gives me the willies and makes me sad. And probably kills a kitten every time somebody runs it.

Update:
Maybe I should open my eyes as there is a screenshot in the first post. ^_^

Apparently you didn't look at the source because it's not windows, it uses Mirans gui in an allegro window which is completely cross platform. You can #define NO_MAGIC_MAIN on any platform.

Wow, that looks very simple to use. Not much different than on Windows

It's a Windows executable because I compiled it with MinGW and MinGW produces Windows executables Other than that it's a perfectly normal Allegro program that uses my GUI library. Porting it to Linux is straightforward, except for that DLL loading thing.

And btw, writing a minigame doesn't require any knowledge of C++. Yes, you have to write one class, but that's why I wrote template.cpp. You can use it as a starting point and just implement those three or four functions that need to be implemented (init, deinit, logic and draw).

EDIT: Bad news everyone. Looks like this will never work on Linux or any platform other than Windows...

OK, I see there's not much interest in this. But I'd still like to see some nice little fun games on this thing. So if anyone has something, feel free to post

You must have missed the other thread I made I figured out dynamic .so loading and it works fine. The GUI runs, the .so files are loaded and queried for game name, author name, etc. and the game list box is populated like it should be. But when I try to run a game, it crashes. That's because the .dll/.so runs in a different allegro context (for lack of a better description) so it has to do install_allegro(), set_gfx_mode() and all that for itself (the base class for the plugins does that automatically). But in order to integrate nicely with the host program it must use the same window the host program created when it ran set_gfx_mode(). Now under Windows that's not a problem because there are win_get_window() and win_set_window() functions (the host program lets the dll have its window), but on X there's no equivalent for that. I put Windows specific code in #ifdef/#endif blocks so on X it doesn't get executed, so when the .so comes to set_gfx_mode(), it crashes and takes the host program down with it as well...

Good news everyone! We're delivering a package to... no, wait, that's not it... Oh yeah, I managed to make it work on Linux! And there was nothing to it. I had so many problems on Windows I just assumed it must be the same on Linux so I didn't even bother to try the obvious. Until just now that is, and to my amazement everything works and you don't even have to do anything special about it. Just load the .so with dlopen() and that's it. Now I feel extra stupid.

But also happy! Because now it finally works, and it works even better than on Windows, because there fullscreen mode doesn't work half the time and on Linux it does! Woohoo!

Anyway, I updated the first post with a link to the v2.01 source (amgc2.tar.gz). Please, if there's anyone out there who uses Linux and has MASkinG installed, be so kind and try to compile the code and tell me what results you get. It's just one "make" for the host program and one "make all" for the games. I would post a binary but I'm affraid that just won't work for most people...

Btw, on Linux some skins might not work right because they rely on MS Windows fonts