DJGPP and the Allegro game library were my first foray into C++ in around 1996-1997 if I recall. Having access to a proper 32-bit protected mode system in DOS (without having to pirate a bunch of other compilers!) was a pretty incredible step forward for the community.

I pretty quickly moved onto building in Win95/98 with MSVC not long after, but I am very grateful to DJ for the compiler and Shawn Hargreaves for Allegro.

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grumbel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One really nice thing with Allegro is that it's still around, many Linux distributions still ship it and those 30 year old games can still be recompiled quite easily.

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the_af an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ditto.

I'm surprised that DJGPP is sometimes mentioned here, but (my impression at least) Shawn Hargreaves and Allegro seldom are. To my young self, Allegro was a huge deal.

I wonder what became of DJ Delorie? His site doesn't seem updated anymore. Apparently Shawn Hargreaves isn't involved with Allegro anymore, but there are some recent updates to his website.

	▲	oso2k a minute ago \| parent [-]
		DJ’s still at Red Hat. I talked to him in our (RH’s) retro slack channel occasionally. PDPs, DECs, VAXes, Commodore, Amiga, SUN, and DOS are frequently discussed there.

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bena 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. Djgpp with allegro was a godsend for someone without the funds or means to purchase software.