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.