Yes. DJGPP and Allegro was a great help, and a big step up from the old Borland Turbo Pascal I started out with. I remember trying to rotate an image pixel by pixel in Pascal. Allegro simply had a function to do it. And yes, the mailing list was great - Shawn Hargreaves and the couple of people in the inner circle (I seem to remember someone called George) were simply awesome, helpful people.

I eventually installed Red Hat, started at university and lost most of my free time to study projects.

George Foot :)