Re: [AD] More OSX Allegro Notes

[Angelo Mottola <a.mottola@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> You know, now that the OSX version of the lib is nearing feature
> completion and bugs are being stamped out, you might want to fire off
> an e-mail to Apple.  Who knows -- you might end up getting Allegro on
> the Apple news site.  They've been pretty damned good about many
> different OSS projects, with many of the Apple developers working on
> OSS projects in their spare time.  If anything, I'm sure they'd want to
> help Allegro become on-par with the other ports, since it'd mean a lot
> of new shareware games available for OSX.  I'm willing to bet they'd
> have the answers to a few niggling questions, too.

Of course Allegro needs a bit of publicity on the Mac scene; just recently I
saw on the iDevGames forums a discussion on available 2d libs/APIs for
OSX... And people who said "SDL" also complained it was slow under the Apple
OS. I think Allegro is faster as it optimizes window updating and it's
completely multithreaded (3 threads always running, 5 when sound is active).

> Doesn't seem to generate plugins.h, although I haven't run 'make
> clean', then 'make depend', then 'make'.  I'll try that tonight after a
> CVS update.

Let me know if it fixes the problem.

> I think we're the only ones, man. :)

For now, just for now ;)
Mac people WILL come if they'll know Allegro.

> Seriously though, I'm going to post some stuff on iDevGames.com and try
> to get some coverage.  I think the reason there aren't too many OSX
> developers on this list is simply that nobody knows the port's been
> done. ^_^;;

Remember the OSX support is not yet official. I think it'll officially be
only in 4.2, but here the final word is to be said by our master Eric.
I somehow doubt we'll get *great* coverage if we don't have an official
version or at least a WIP to show them (and not require them to checkout
CVS!).

> As to the fixbundle tool, yours *does* solve the issue of getting
> permission to include the IconFamily files with Allegro, so ...
> Regardless, I'll offer mine for download from my page, I suppose.  I
> think I'll stick with them because the way they work is more unix-y,
> which I dig.

Ok, I've added mine to the repository. I also made a lot of updates,
including proper mouse detection (via a new HID Manager interface) and
removed last bit of Carbon dependency (now we're fully Cocoa based).

-- 
Angelo Mottola
a.mottola@xxxxxxxxxx