I have heard a bunch of talk about using DirectX 5 to capture a wider audience, but I am having difficulty locating the information and resources necessary to learn and use it. Could anyone direct me to the books, web sites, etc. that you use? All the information I have found is either lacking or for later versions of DirectX. Thanks.

Nathan Williams

I use Allegro (http://www.allegro.cc) which is a freely available crossplatform 2D graphics API who's windows implemention is based off of directDraw 5.0. It's quite easy to use and performs excelently in my expirence.

Here's another link (http://www.digitalmzx.net/micah/geek/allegro_vc.php) that's helpful in setting up allegro on your machine.

I'm using Allegro too (thanks Dan) partly because I dont care to writing my own line, circle routines or image loaders and want my game to work on almost all machines out there. I love it. Its obscenely simple and bloody fast (> 100 FPS on my humble pc) and works on multiple platforms (windoze, linux, macos, you name it). By all means if you are doing a 2d game, go for it.

Allegro developers have given it as gift-ware meaning you can use it to develop the game and still not choose to say you used it. If you do credit them somewhere, I wonder how may this affect the sales if users percieve that you didnt actually write the game from scratch but instead you did it with Allegro or shockwave. Do users care?

i guess people who play the game dont even know what allegro is..;)....and just buy the game if it is fun to play anyway...:)

Of course the gamers don't care if you wrote it from scratch or not. Most gamers don't think like the people in the demo scene. ;) Gamers looking for cutting-edge 3D FPS titles might care but, then again, I don't think there's anyone here looking to target that audience anyway.

- Air

If you threw up an "Allegro" splash screen at the beginning of your game I’m sure none of your users would even have a clue what you were talking about. Only the coder geeks like us would think it was cool (and some elitist technophiles would probably scoff at you, but who’s trying to impress them?)

@jaggu: Heh, dont thank me, I just use it for the same reasons you do. It's easy, it speeds development, and it just plain works. :)

Yes, thank you for the information about Allegro. It looks like a very useful and easy library to use. However, I am looking for information on DirectX 5. Does anyone have any reference recommendations?

Nathan Williams

Here's a link (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=12471&area=search&ordinal=5) that was posted in another thread. It's to the DX7.0 documentation which I believe contains all the information on the directdraw interfaces that were included in DX5.0

i think windows game programming for dummies deals with dx 5. it is basic stuff, but it is a good start. i can only think of it at the moment. but you can check it out at amazon.com, its got some pretty good reviews. To be honest i started DX 5 from that book. Hope that helps.

Since people are plugging Allegro I'm going to plug SDL, which you can get at http://www.libsdl.org and it will use whatever version of DirectX is available on the computer (I think the lowest verson is 5). And it's portable! Among other things which you can read about on their site. :) It's licensed under the LGPL which means you don't have to worry about anything as long as you link to it dynamically (which is the most logical way to do it anyway).

Well, unfortunately I cannot help because I am on dialup. I have every directx sdk archived to cd, but they are HUGE. The dx5sdk is more than 33 Megs. But the dx sdks are part of the Visual C distribution, too. So, if you have VC5 you have dx3sdk and VC6 contatins dx5 I think.

Also you should check out the older MSDNs and Technet for more information and articles about Dx.

HTH,

I think the poster just wants the .chm file so he can read the documentation as a reference.... could be wrong though.

http://therabbithole.redback.inficad.com/tricks/directx5/docs/

If I understand things correctly (and I very well might not), Allegro actually provides some drawing primitives, whereas SDL doesn't. They aren't really comparable.

I'm currently using SDL (http://www.libsdl.org) in my project but I've taken a look at Allegro (http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/) and I think they're very comparable. The design philosophies are different though. Allegro offers a game programming API in a single distribution, which is convenient. SDL includes only basic, low-level graphics and sound in the core distribution. However, you can also get a number of add-on libraries (http://www.libsdl.org/libraries.php) as needed to make up the difference. For example, if you need a full set of primitives, you can get SDL_draw (http://sdl-draw.sourceforge.net). The core only supports BMP loading and saving, but you can use SDL_image (http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image) to load a number of image formats. There is also a selection of different font handlers, GUI classes, and sprite engines if you want them. So far the only one of these I'm using is SDL_image, but I think I'm going to rip out everything but the PNG code to reduce the size of the file. I've written my own font code, because I know what I want out of it, and the only primitives I've needed are putPixel and getPixel, which are actually given as examples in the documentation.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks. I had only ever messed with the base SDL lib.

The Microsoft Press book "Inside DirectX" is a basic primer on DirectX, and was published when DirectX 5.2 was the latest version of the SDK, so may be just what you're looking for. There are several copies available on half.com:

Inside DirectX (http://half.ebay.com/cat/buy/prod.cgi?cpid=581266&domain_id=1856&meta_id=1)

One little correction:
Allegro uses DirectX 7.0 (well, at least since v4.0.0). So if you really chase the "attract users with dx5", then Allegro is not the choice.
On the other hand, when we started developing a game we're now working on, our graphics programmer chose the "plain DirectX" approach. Where are we? Nowhere! :) TGA loader sucks, mouse flickers, pixel formats differ and so on, and so forth. So my suggestion for every indie developer would be: don't write what is written. Choose Allegro, SDL or whatever you like, but for god's sake don't start playing directly with DX or OGL or WinAPI. Those few percent of audience that don't have dx7 aren't worth the effort of writing from scratch.