Hello,
I'm very new to game design and I'm interested in using Allegro 5. I was wondering if there are and good tutorials I can follow or books I can read up on, on how to use Allegro 5. I purchased Game Programming All in One (Third Edition) by Jonathan S. Harbour. Unfortunately the book uses Allegro 4.2 which I can't even get to compile on modern Windows with MSYS2 and Mingw-W64. There is another book written about game design using Allegro 5 but unfortunately the book is in French and I don't understand French. I looked to see if the book had any translations but I couldn't find any. I know how to program in C so hence the interest in Allegro. I've been browsing through the wiki but most of the tutorials are quite sparse and basic and the Allegro 5 documentation is not very user friendly. It just lists out all the functions that Allegro 5 has but it doesn't go in to much detail on use etc. Does anyone have any suggestions on where I can get more reading material on Allegro 5? I'm very much interested in this library but I'm at a loss at where I should begin.
Thanks in advance,
Sean

Hey Sean,

First some info.

Allegro 4.2 uses the old make files and is probably broken for building with newer compilers.

The latest release for the Allegro 4 branch is Allegro 4.4.3 which uses CMake as its build system.

Allegro 4 has been superseded by Allegro 5. 4 used software drawing and input polling where 5 uses hardware acceleration and event based input.

I have binaries for Allegro 4.4.3 and Allegro 5.2.4 which you can find here :

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/617424

If you really want to learn allegro 5, your best source of reading materials are the source code for the demo games and the example programs.

https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/tree/master/demos

https://github.com/liballeg/allegro5/tree/master/examples

There are tutorials for Allegro 5 games out there, just search for them and I'm sure you'll find a bunch of video tutorials. Personally I hate videos they take too long.

Once you have Allegro 5 down, you can learn OpenGL and use it right alongside allegro. Or Direct3D if that's your thing.

My sig has links to the binaries and also a compile guide for Allegro 5.

Thank you so much for the reply. I managed to get Allegro 4.4.3 compiled on my system from source and I'm thinking of using that. I'm going to work through the Jonathan Harbor book and see how it is. It's unfortunate that Allegro 5 is lacking in documentation. I would have liked to learn the newer library instead of an old one.

This is interesting because I find the Allegro 5 docs to be excellent. It's one of the reasons I use Allegro. Just out of curiosity, what sort of documentation would you like to see? Did you see these tutorials?

https://wiki.allegro.cc/index.php?title=Allegro_5_API_Tutorials

Not to bash people but Jonathan s Harbors book game programming all-in-one 3rd Edition is kind of crap he doesn't know how to use Allegro that well and he doesn't have good code architecture. If you want to learn the basics the wiki tutorial is a good place to start.

You're welcome to learn allegro 4 but it's no longer developed. Allegro5 is where it's at.

In response to this thread, I've decided to work a bit on the Allegro Wiki being migrated to GitHub.

https://github.com/liballeg/allegro_wiki/wiki/Resolution-independence

Peer review is a good thing.

Obligatory plug of the new Allegro Vivace, though the sound and gameplay sections still need writing.

This is meant to be the Allegro 5 tutorial, and so far, it's had precisely one author - so peer review is absolutely requested.

The wiki article on github was very helpful. The commenting is very enlightening. Thanks.

Search on YouTube "Allegro Made Easy".

and Mike Geig's "5.1 -Allegro 5 Game".

they both are really good.