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Installing the Allegro Library under DevC++

A little while ago I become interested in trying my hand at working with a C++ graphics library – perhaps to make a simple game for myself. With minimal effort, and a trip to Google, I discovered Allegro. Allegro is a game programming library for C++, or C, coders. It is freely distributed, and available on Unix, Windows, and MacOS X. The library is renowned for being beginner friendly, and easy to code with. Me, being quite the novice, I decided to give it a try.

To make a long story short, I was not able to complete the ‘installation’ process under the DevC++ IDE. The documentation available for the installation was very involved, and proved to be a little too challenging for me to complete. So much for being beginner friendly! I won’t bore you with what went wrong, but rather, I’ll show you how I got it up and running instead.

If you’re seriously interested in reading this article – I’m going to make the assumption that you’re in the same boat as I was during the install – and that you know what the hell DevC++ is!

Checklist

There are two things we’ll need to complete our Allegro installation.

1. A working DevC++ install – with mingw.
2. A brain.

The Process

Installing Allegro for DevC++ turned out to be fairly simple once I was shown the easy route. The Allegro wiki would have you install MingW, copy and paste files into numerous folders, and set linker paths for the compiler in DevC++. You might even have to compile the thing yourself! This is a lot for ‘a beginner’ to handle, especially someone who has never used a third party library in a program before. Fortunately for us, DevC++ has a nifty feature known as a ‘Package manager’. this will allow us to grab something called a ‘devpak’, or development package, from the internet and install it with minimal effort. A devpak is a precompiled version of a library that is much easier to install than the normal source file.

To begin our installation we’ll first need to start up DevC++. If you haven’t already installed the DevC++ IDE, you should probably do so now. Once you’ve got it up and running, you’ll want to navigate to the tools menu, and then to the ‘Check for Updates/Packages…’ tab. See Figure 1.

From the Updates/Packages we’ll need to select a devpak server, and grab the list of available devpaks – and then use the filter to find packs related to Allegro. Once that’s done, you should have a screen similar to figure 2. Now, you’ll want to click the ‘Download Package’ button, and then follow the simple instructions to install the package once it’s downloaded.

You now have a working installation of the allegro library.

Try it out!

To make use of the library, we’ll have to start a new project. To do this, you need to go to the New Project menu. This menu is divided into 3 categories – Basic, Multimedia, and Introduction. To get started with Allegro, we want the Multimedia tab. Now, select ‘Allegro Application (static)’ to begin an allegro project.

…That’s all there is to it. Enjoy.

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