Use destroy_bitmap(). delete doesn't know anything about Allegro's bitmaps, and might or might not do the wrong thing. delete is only for freeing memory allocated with new.

It's just the way I have always been

...cool! This may be the contender for the nest noob intro post yet!!!

To go more into detail, Allegro is written in C. The standard C functions for allocating and freeing memory on the heap are the malloc family and free. C++ uses new and delete operators to instantiate objects on the heap and destroy/free them. Both can give you a pointer to a chunk of memory representing some data, but they are incompatible with one another. You cannot free something you allocated with new or delete something that you allocated with malloc. I'm not sure what Allegro uses under the surface for memory allocation, but more than likely it is malloc-based. Even if it isn't, it is certainly not new/delete-based since those are C++ constructs.

To go even more into detail, malloc and free purely manage memory. They allocate memory and release it respectively, but that's all they do. They don't initialize the memory in any way. In C, you typically have a function that initializes a structure's members. That is what al_load_bitmap does, for example. There is generally a matching function for API creation functions like this to destroy the "thing" and release the memory. For example, al_destroy_bitmap. The new operator in C++ does more than just allocate memory. It also executes a class' constructor, which initializes the object's members, and possibly carries out some logic. Similarly, the delete operator first calls a class' destructor before releasing the memory which may release internal resources or carry out some logic. They are different animals with similar roles. As a rule, when you're writing C code you should use the malloc and free family of functions, and in C++ you should use the new and delete operators. With a C library like Allegro, you should be using the library API to create, initialize, and destroy data (and generally access the data). When writing your own C code it's probably a good idea to wrap your creation/destuction code into reusable functions too.

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