This post is a portion of Part 1 in my on going series about 2D Game Development using the Allegro 5 library. These posts are in course order. You can see all of the posts in this course by clicking the “2D Game Development” button at the top of this site.
- Part 1.0: Intro to Game Development
- Part 1.1: Installing Allegro 5 with Visual Studio 2010
- Part 1.2: Your First Allegro 5 program
In this video, we will be looking at installing Allegro 5 with Visual Studio 2010. In case you do not have the full version of Visual Studio 2010, this tutorial (and subsequent code) should work with Visual Studio VC++ Express.
In the next section, we will look at writing our first Allegro app.
A user, Mario, had this to say about Dev-C
You can install it on Dev-C, its really easy
1.-Download “allegro-5.0.5-1cmw.DevPak”
2.-Execute the file and clic next,next…
3.-Done
4.-Create a new project “Allegro5 aplication”I am using Dev-C and all runs perfect
Using linux I don’t have access to, nor the desire to use, any version of visual studios. I would recommend Code::Blocks, however, since it’s cross platform and should be able to interface with allegro: http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=Using_Allegro_with_Code::Blocks
This is true, however in my teaching environment (what I am making these for) we use Visual Studio. Though if you do use linux or mac, all of the code will still function, you will just need to setup your projects differently.
I tried to compile Allegro 5 from source because A) I’d rather use a text editor/command line/makefile to compile and B) I wanted to statically link Allegro to the executable, which I think needs to be done at compile time. Do you think you could update this with help compiling Allegro 5 from the source (or at least statically linking Allegro)? The wiki leaves too much to the imagination, and I couldn’t figure it out, even though I managed to compile Allegro 4.4 just fine.
In the future, I will be happy to update my tutorials to include many different configurations. As it stands now though, I am making these materials for courses I teach and so the production of new materials takes precedence. In the meantime, if you find a good tutorial or figure out how to do it yourself, I will be happy to post it here for everyone else.
This is a nice simple way of installing, but if you want to learn more about configuring Visual Studio to use external files, you can read under
Setup Froject for Allegro 5. (This will let you keep all Allegro related files in a separate folder.)
Yes, the wiki is a great source of information. I just like to keep things simple on this site.
Your intro is very promising. The video parts are also great but they are hard to play or download over slow connections. If you consider adding transcripts, it will help those of us with low bandwidth access. Overall, well done, teacher.
I would love to offer written versions of my tutorials, but I just don’t have time to make them. If someone is interested in making them, I would be eternally grateful.
I downloaded Allegro 5.0.1 and I have more then 3 folders showed in video. I have:
addons, cmake, demos, docs, examples, include, iphone-xcode, misc, python, src, tests and tools folders and 15 other root files.
How do I install it to my MS Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition?
Or if there is version like in video please provide me with link.
Thanks in advance!
You downloaded wrong package. Try this one:
http://static.allegro.cc/file/library/allegro/5.0.6/allegro-5.0.6-msvc-9.0.zip
The Allegro bin files are not system library files and you SHOULD NEVER copy them into the windows folder. Just wanted to point that out.
In Visual C++ 2010 Express, you can go Configuration Properties->Debugging
and set the Environment to PATH=c\allegro\bin;%PATH%
If you have placed the allegro folder somewhere else then edit the path accordingly.
Agreed and this is mentioned somewhere else on the site. Like I have said, I was going for the quickest, lowest entry point for working with this.
Oh, but before ALL OF THAT, make sure to install codeblocks LOL. That shouldn’t be hard to do.
now if i can only figure out how to load it into Dev-CPP on Windows lol.
I made a typo from copy/pasting so much.
These instructions—
unpack it inside of codeblocks\mingw
rename it to allegro
— Are for the allegro5 download.
Not the CMake install.
My mistake.