Configuration
Allegro reads information about your hardware from a file called
allegro.cfg. If this file doesn't exist it will autodetect (ie. guess :-)
You can write your config file by hand with a text editor, or you can use
the setup utility program (located in the setup directory).
Normally the setup program and allegro.cfg will go in the same directory
as the Allegro program they are controlling. This is fine for the end
user, but it can be a pain for a programmer using Allegro because you may
have several programs in different directories and want to use a single
allegro.cfg for all of them. If this is the case you can set the
environment variable ALLEGRO to the directory containing your
allegro.cfg, and Allegro will look there if there is no allegro.cfg in
the current directory.
The mapping tables used to store different keyboard layouts are stored in
a file called keyboard.dat. This must either be located in the same
directory as your Allegro program, or in the directory pointed to by the
ALLEGRO environment variable. If you want to support different
international keyboard layouts, you must distribute a copy of
keyboard.dat along with your program.
Various translations of things like the system error messages are stored
in a file called language.dat. This must either be located in the same
directory as your Allegro program, or in the directory pointed to by the
ALLEGRO environment variable. If you want to support non-English versions
of these strings, you must distribute a copy of language.dat along with
your program.
Under Unix, BeOS and MacOS X, the config file routines also check for
~/allegro.cfg, ~/.allegrorc, /etc/allegro.cfg, and /etc/allegrorc, in
that order, and the keyboard and language files can be stored in your
home directory or in /etc/. If under MacOS X, the application bundle
Contents/Resources directory, if any, is also scanned first.
See docs/txt/allegro.txt for details of the config file format.