Since we've all been here so long, I figure ML could give us some kind of titles. You know, like nobility, since we've been freedom fighters for allegro.cc since the day we downloaded Allegro 3.9.11 cough well me anyway cough

So I want my title to be Major Reynaldo. Titles are available on first come first serve basis. Vote for the title you want now, by reply to this thread.^[1].

Oh, kids these days that think 2007 is a long time ago I was a member before a.cc existed , if you count Allegro Games Depot.

I'm an American we rejected titles of nobility when we declared independence in 1776.

But in reality I'm just not creative enough to think of a title .

I've not been silent for decades. I just post SUPER rarely now . If you remember a year or two ago I was working on jalleg. These days I would be even more interested in seeing if Allegro can be made to work with GraalVM's native compilation mode -- instant start up + no JRE required + still can use Java. But I haven't quite figured out how it bridges to C code unless that C code was in LLVM, in which case the foreign function interface disappears apparently so there is zero-overhead calls between C and Java.

Well one of my motives for jalleg was that providing it also then supports any other languages on JVM such as JS, which of course you could type in and now it's totally dynamic and a more mainstream approach than using lua. And of course there are Ruby implementations on JVM, so with jalleg you could do Ruby + Eagle + Allegro today. I don't know the full extent of the quality of Ruby implementations on JVM though.

EDIT: a link to the most popular one that I know of: https://www.jruby.org/

Wow I guess I did jalleg farther back than I thought.

The latest version of jalleg deployed to Maven Central (public package repo) is 0.1. Most changes since then is the docs (which is seen on github page) and JDK 11 building support. There are getting started docs here:

https://github.com/gillius/jalleg

The latest runtime I've pushed is 5.2.3. I only push Allegro runtimes for Windows x86. If you are running on Linux, you just need to have allegro installed on your ld_path (i.e. liballegro.so) as you would for any normal C-based app.

I wouldn't worry about the version number. I believe I mapped virtually all of the functions of Allegro.

You can see what I've mapped here: https://github.com/gillius/jalleg/blob/master/jalleg-binding/BindingStatus.md

You can see example Java program on that page. Since JRuby runs in JVM you can call Java code. I don't know what its equivalent is for importing, but if you import AllegroLibrary class, the static methods on that class it should look as much as possible like the C code.

I do provide an optional jalleg-framework component which can be used to make it more friendly in an object-oriented and managed/garbage collected environment.

I have pong clone examples using the raw "C" API and using jalleg-framework.

The callbacks work in jalleg just as well as in C. They just call Java methods, not C ones. With Java 8+ lamdbas the callbacks even can look like inline functions like what you'd see in JavaScript.

Although I am realizing now you can't use Eagle out of the box, since it would be a separate C library. You'd have to provide a JNA binding to Eagle. However, JNA maps to C fairly easily, basically the hard part is that you need to manually convert the header or use a tool like JNAerator which takes header files, but as you know in C, header files can be a little tricky since they rely on a lot of external context, the class ultimately just has a bunch of native methods like so:

  public static native void al_draw_bitmap(ALLEGRO_BITMAP bitmap, float dx, float dy, int flags);
  public static native void al_draw_bitmap_region(ALLEGRO_BITMAP bitmap, float sx, float sy, float sw, float sh, float dx, float dy, int flags);
  public static native void al_draw_scaled_bitmap(ALLEGRO_BITMAP bitmap, float sx, float sy, float sw, float sh, float dx, float dy, float dw, float dh, int flags);

If you just have functions with primitives and callbacks it's not too bad but if you get into structs or a large number of functions, the tool may be worth using. To build the mapping for Allegro I ran the tool on each header file one at a time then did some cleanup (there can be different choices for how to map things) and pasted and merged into one file.

I think I requested "Village Idiot" once. Is it still available? As for my project, I am treating a serious case of writer's block with a healthy dose of Final Fantasy on a Nintendo emulator.

Me too! I lost my first account though. I have mostly been lurking all these years, and I will continue to do so until the end. This place is so much nostalgia for me...

That's been said for a very long time now, yet, we're still here.

As for titles, despite being from old Europe, I do not want one. Only losers need titles.

We all know your real name is Arthur KallioKosKi. ^{note the KKK}

Oh, and if you don't want a new title, make it a new account name then. But keep the old account.

Why did Edgar get his title and not the rest of us?

Dreams really do come true!

Did you notice Arthur Kalliokoski was named second in command, or have I not noticed it before?