[AD] Porting

[Charles Wardlaw <kattkieru@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has written a porting guide for new system
targets.  I've been looking into doing a port to OS X Carbon (no
promises yet, as work has kept time to a minimum and there's a lot I
don't yet understand), and while some parts of the source have helped a
little I'm thinking I need a more human-readable understanding of
what's going on, not unlike what's found in the ahack.txt file.

My background: DOS programming.  I've been using Allegro since one of
the early 2 versions, and have been quite happy with it as a simple
means of porting an application to windows, but I switched and now am
without easy game programming ability on my Mac.  My larger issue is
that I am not really versed in how things should be done on a
multitasking, windowed OS.

I'm also wondering how certain OS caveats should be handled.  For
instance, I ran some hardware diagnostics on my mac today, and found
that it supports 8 bit color, but the lowest possible resolution is
640x480.  Also, video memory bitmaps don't seem to be possible, and
windows are double-buffered by default while full-screen game windows
seem to not be (still trying to figure this out).

So is there a PORTING.TXT or a guide on writing hardware drivers, etc,
and merging them into the current codebase?  A wiki somewhere?  A
journal by the people who ported from DOS to Win32/DirectX or X11?

Thanks in advance,
- Charles Wardlaw