First, an off-topic comment. I never had any trouble using allegro GUI myself, it is simple and well documented. I found the Dialog Editor to be very useful for it. But anyway.. onto your main question.

Yes, here it is: [url http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dk77e5e7(VS.80).aspx]
CFileDialog[/url].

Unfortunately for you it is very very hard (imo at least) to get that function into your program, since somehow you will have to link with MFC. Nonetheless, a search of the forums shows that this worked once for one person in 2001. He did not provide the code showing how to do that however.

Brainstorming a bit, it may be possible to use wxWidgets and use its file dialog functions (which map to native dialogs for Windows), however I do not know whether it is possible to bind a wxWindow to a pre-existing allegro window.

But basically, what you ask for is very hard to accomplish.

Depends on what you use. If you use do_dialog, then yes, it is blocking. Usually, however, you use the:init_dialog/update_dialog/shutdown_dialog
trio.

Basically, you call the init_dialog on your DIALOG* array when you wish to invoke/initialize the GUI, and then in your game loop you call update_dialog on the DIALOG_PLAYER. Later on you call the shutdown_dialog to clean up.

I can't seem to find a good tutorial on this unfortunately... although I had little trouble using this. (Although I did have to force it to draw by calling dialog_message with the MSG_DRAW message every time before I did update_dialog)...

EDIT: If you end up sticking with Allegro's gui, I highly recommend AGUP to make it look a little nicer.

Something I thought I would whip something up. The joy of having done some windows programing before.

So name this "main.c"

Then in mingw go...

gcc -odialog.exe main.c -lalleg -lcomdlg32

For more information about the function and the struct look at

GetOpenFileName http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646927(VS.85).aspx
OPENFILENAME http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646839(VS.85).aspx
GetSaveFileName http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646928(VS.85).aspx

You should read through the docs, to make sure I haven't made a mistake in understanding OPENFILENAME.

This assumes everything is in ansi strings, but I call the ansi function so all good. You might need to tweak stuff if you want this to work under NT you need to detect it and use "OPENFILENAME_SIZE_VERSION_400" not "sizeof(OPENFILENAME)"

I hope this helps, I haven't used this function in a long while.

If anyone does end up using this in something complete a thanks in a doc wouldn't go astray You don't have to btw.

If you have problems, post them and I will help where I can.

I would be willing to attempt it in gnome and kde (when the computer comes back from the shop), but I don't have a mac to do that part.

I'm not sure implementing it based on desktop environments is that good an idea, we need something that will work in fluxbox without gnome or kde stuff installed, my current setup.

This doesn't really belong in allegro core anyway, it should be an addon.

Naturally not, most everything seems to be an addon for Allegro 5 anyway.

The idea is to have an easy to use function able to call up the native file open dialog if possible for the current system. I guess in Fluxbox's case, if it doesn't have such a standard file open dialog (I don't have much experience with Fluxbox), some sort of Allegro GUI dialog would be called as a fallback option.

Awesome! That looks like it's just what I needed. Compiles fine with MinGW, too. (that was certainly an issue with MFC stuff...) Just gotta figure out what's going on...then I'll be set!

Um... * awards Schrodinger's Cookie? *

Just don't look at it.

[edit]And I'm not too worried about the NT bit...if I was wanting it to run on anything but my machine, I'd have to find something more portable anyways.