Allegro is a software library for video game development. The functionality of the library includes support for basic 2D graphics, image manipulation, text output, audio output, MIDI music, input and timers, as well as additional routines for fixed-point and floating-point

matrix Matrix most commonly refers to: * ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise ** '' The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film ** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchi ...

arithmetic, Unicode strings, file system access, file manipulation, data files, and 3D graphics. The library is written in the

C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as ...

and designed to be used with C, C++, or Objective-C, with bindings available for Python,

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

, Scheme, D, Go, and other languages. Allegro comes with extensive documentation and many examples. Allegro supports Windows, macOS, Unix-like systems,

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

, and iOS, abstracting their

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

s (APIs) into one portable interface. It can run also on top of Simple DirectMedia Layer which is used to run Allegro programs in web browser using

Emscripten Emscripten is an LLVM/Clang-based compiler that compiles C and C++ source code to WebAssembly (or to a subset of JavaScript known as asm.js, its original compilation target before the advent of WebAssembly in 2017), primarily for execution in we ...

. Released under the terms of the zlib license, Allegro is free and open source software.

History

Initially standing for ''Atari Low-Level Game Routines'', Allegro was originally created by for the

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

in the early 1990s. However, Hargreaves abandoned the Atari version as he realized the platform was dying, and reimplemented his work for the

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

C++ and DJGPP compilers in 1995. Support for Borland C++ was dropped in version 2.0, and DJGPP was the only supported compiler. As DJGPP was a DOS compiler, all games which used Allegro therefore used DOS. Around 1998, Allegro branched out into several versions. A port to Windows, WinAllegro, was created, and also during this time, a Unix port of Allegro, XwinAllegro, was created. These various ports were brought together during the Allegro 3.9 WIP versions, with Allegro 4.0 being the first stable version of Allegro to support multiple platforms.

Allegro 5

Current development is focused on the Allegro 5 branch, a complete redesign of both the API and much of the library's internal operation. Effort was made to make the API more consistent and multi-thread safe. By default, the library is now hardware accelerated using OpenGL or DirectX rendering backends where appropriate. Many of the addons that existed as separate projects for Allegro 4 now interface seamlessly with Allegro proper and are bundled with the default installation. Allegro 5 is event driven.

Features

Allegro 5 supports following features in its Core API: * Configuration files – INI format file handling * Displays - working with windows * Events - event management * File I/O - abstraction over both real files and files inside some data file (e.g. ZIP * archive) * Filesystem - abstraction over both real file system and file system inside some data file (e.g. ZIP archive) * Fixed point math - might useful for embedded processors without FPU * Fullscreen modes * Graphics routines - colors, pixel formats, bitmaps, clipping * Haptic routines - force feedback and vibration on input devices * Joystick routines * Keyboard routines * Memory management * Monitors * Mouse routines * Path structures - file path manipulation * Shader * State - you can store and later restore the state of Allegro application * System routines * Threads * Time * Timer * Touch input * Transformations – transformation of coordinates for 2D and 3D * UTF-8 string routines * Direct3D integration * OpenGL integration

Addons

The community of Allegro users have contributed several library extensions to handle things like scrolling tile maps and import and export of various file formats. Also some parts of what used to be part of Allegro, is now separated as an addon in Allegro 5. These addons are distributed with the core library: * Audio addon * Audio codecs - .wav, .flac, .ogg, .opus, .it, .mod, .s3m, .xm, .voc * Color addon - color space conversion * Font addons * Image I/O addon - BMP, DDS, PCX, TGA, JPEG, PNG * Main addon * Memfile addon - treat a fixed block of contiguous memory as a file * Native dialogs addon * PhysicsFS addon - using archive as a file system * Primitives addon - drawing primitives (e.g. circle) * Video streaming addon

References

External links