Heh, I popped in here because I'm bored at work, and saw some current posts relating to Allegro. "Wow," I thought to myself, "it's still around!" See, I played around a bit with Allegro back in the day, probably like six years ago now. I made a little DOS game that was a super-glorified Pong. Anyway, that's beside the point. What I'm wondering is, how far has Allegro progressed since then? Pardon me if I sound naive but, does it support 3D? DirectX and/or OpenGL? Audio options? Extensibility? What do you vastly-more-experienced folks have to say on the subject? Another side note: I noticed at the Allegro.cc site that it should be built with gcc. [Big dumb question ahead!] gcc is a core part of Linux, right? Which means I should be able to build Allegro on a Windows machine using CygWin... (I have CygWin at work but am very, very, *very* new to it). So theoretically, I could work with all my source files in Visual Studio .NET 2003, and build through CygWin. Am I anywhere in the ballpark with this? Sorry for so many questions, I just remember good times with old-school Allegro, and am hoping that I can resurrect that in a more modern way. Thanks all! ;) That is all.

I seem to have posted too soon. I'm browsing through the Allegro.cc site a little more and answering many of my questions. ;)

Ok, so I guess all I'm really interested in now is: can I code in Visual Studio and build in CygWin? And also, what's the general opinion of Allegro's current capabilities and suitability for game development? (We're talking primarily 2D, maybe some simple 3D, but nothing like a AAA FPS or the like).

That is all.

I can't speak for Visual Studio and CygWin, but for 2D game development, Allegro kicks very large portions of ass. The API is a little long in the tooth (Allegro 5.0 will be a complete re-write, but that's a long ways off) but very fast and very capable.