Allegro port

[v3cz0r]

Yeah i know, but: ".extern is accepted in the source program--for compatibility with other assemblers--but it is ignored. as treats all undefined symbols as external", that's from gas' manual.

Like in QB, there's no way to shared vars between modules, then using COMMON, but in C you would have to declare them the same way as in FB, that would be all names in uppercase - and if you declare them in QB using suffixes (%&), it's even more difficult to know the right name.

Why do you need to share that kind of var between C and basic? I don't think it would be too safe, anyone could do screen = garbage at fb and loads of craps would happen - why not doing the SDL way? The user has the control over the bitmaps/surfaces, i thought Allegro was that way too..

[DrV]

Allegro uses an external variable called 'screen' to represent the hardware screen bitmap, and one called 'key' to represent the keyboard keys, etc... I'm not sure how it all works under the hood, but it works in C...  

[relsoft]

Heh... for some reason Bobby Krusty (that font guy from years ago) came to mind, just seconds before the Cosmox Bobby. ::  But now Jorden needs to launch a freebasic site and it'll be a trifecta

trifecta.  The memories.... :*)

I thought it was you, wurka and chaoticmass?

[na_th_an]

screen is just a BITMAP structure that represents the screen. That way, you do a :

Code:

blit (myBuffer, screen, 0, 0, 0, 0, SCREEN_W, SCREEN_H);

to blit your buffer to the screen making it visible. That's why it is shared.

[v3cz0r]

And "screen" is a qb/fb keyword.. Allegro could have added at least dunno al_ to public procs and global variables, there are probably what, 50 different global vars with ordinary names.. backward compatibility, i guess..

[barok]

is there a different syntax for screen?  Any program that i try to compile in fb i have to end up taking out any screen statements.

[relsoft]

Something in the mode of:

Screen width, height, bpp, screenmode

I guess that would work.

[v3cz0r]

Not yet, but when Sterling finishes his qb-like gfx lib.

[Jofers]

Yeah, something like that, rel.  But I was actually using the word "trifecta", meaning "triple winner" alluding to horse racing.

[DrV]

Okay, decided to use a little C lib for getting/setting externs since I needed it anyway for functions to convert string return values to FB strings...  here's a quick demo:
Download fballeg-prerelease-preview.zip
* smiles at qh2 people *
EDIT: crap... forgot to upload bitmap in the zip - fixed now