Dungeon Master Forum

For all developers here - don't know if you know this one already.
Found it today and just checked the feature list, which looks very promising.

http://www.sfml-dev.org/index.php

p.s.: Sophia, hard to say for me, but it looks like it could beat Allegro easily - lots of additional stuff.

Hmm, it seems pretty powerful, though there's nothing there that would make me up and drop Allegro-- but I will admit part of that is just familiarity.

I just read in our german programming forum about it and thought it's worth a look.
But - they say that it is just wrapping the SDL-library - which others call the 'DirectX for Linux' - can't say much about. For my needs Allegro is still good enough and is working very fine - I use graphics mode selection, simple bitmaps, something for palette colors in 256-color-mode, keyboard, mouse, play the samples, and use (only addition to the original code so far) the fileselector and some things of the config-file.
One thing I hate in Allegro is all of the font-stuff, because in this they made incompatible changes all the time - I'm glad DM brings its own font.

I do agree with that. DM made it easy because it had its own font, and (at least for DSB) it was easy to adapt the DM font into a form that Allegro was able to use. Otherwise, there's some messing around you have to do-- in particular, TTF support requires a bit of coercing. Allegro doesn't support it natively, and the libraries are not exactly intuitive.