Man, I haven't been here in a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time... Glad to see my login still works!

Just wanted to quickly shout out that due to... "circumstances", on the order of being terminated by my payment processor and registration key handler for not living up to their brand new and indie-hostile standards, I decided to make my two old Allegro-driven shareware titles, PixelShips Retro and Super Minesweeper, FREEWARE!

Admittedly, I was going to do this eventually anyways but I wanted to have some other more modern game for sale first. In any case, getting this going was a bit of a chore since I don't have access to a decidedly retro compy at the moment to do this kind of work, so I had to set up a Windows XP virtual machine, install my really old copy of Visual Studio 6, PRAY that I could find the old Allegro and DUMB libraries I was using (I could) and then try not to gag at how bad my coding skills were in the mid-2000s compared to now as I hacked out the registration key systems and added command line arguments.

But yeah, that's the main reason I needed to update them at all was so that they would just function right away once installed and also to clear away some of the automation to allow for more manual control over certain aspects, like timing control, windowed/fullscreen, and colour depth, as these are the things which primarily cause them to crash hard on modern systems. They also default to windowed mode now when you run them for the first time since, as I found out the hard way while updating these, modern Windows 10 systems generally have no idea what to do with an 800x600 signal, to say nothing of 320x240.

Anywhoo, the links to them on the Allegro.cc depot are below for those curious to try them out, but again, getting them working can be a pain without a WinXP or earlier system to install them on and I have no intention to do much of anything else with these games given where I've ended up nowadays in terms of making online videos and learning engines like Godot and Unreal, but I still have huge respect for the Allegro community and wanted to update you all on this all the same!

PixelShips Retro on Allegro.cc Depot
Super Minesweeper on Allegro.cc Depot

Technically yes, and in fact, PixelShips Retro already has code in place to do this, but they would be horribly aliased if they filled the screen instead of being stretched to an exact multiple of their internal resolutions, and seeing as both games have windowed support and PXSR supports exact multiple scaling of its window, I didn't see the need to dive that far into it for such old games I don't have time to tinker with anymore; just run 'em windowed!

Hi Kris, nice idea to make your games freewares.

Welcome back :-)

It IS explicit in the in-game help system though!

That's one way to do it for sure. I typically recommend DXWnd since it's a lot more flexible with a lot more features, though unlike dgVoodoo it doesn't add Glide support for games which need it.