libDGL

libDGL is a "retro coding" C library aimed at MS-DOS VGA Mode 13h game development. It is developed with DJGPP with 486 DX2 systems as a baseline target for performance.

Why?

Because it's fun.

If you were looking for something for "retro" MS-DOS game development that is fully featured, really performant and bug-tested that's ready right now, have a look at Allegro 3.x or possibly 4.x depending on what hardware you're targetting.

Status

This library is currently under early development and is lacking many things and probably chock-full of bugs.

Done / Mostly Done

• Primitive drawing support
• Text rendering
• Blitting
• Graphics clipping
• Keyboard input
• Mouse input
• PCX loading/saving
• Math library (general helpers, 2D vector, 3x3 matrix)
• Basic error handling / results

TODO

• Scaled/rotated blitting support
• Blending
• "Mode 7" like support
• Custom font loading (BIOS-like format?)
• Joystick / Gravis GamePad support
• PC speaker sounds
• Sound Blaster compatible sound/music
• Gravis Ultrasound compatible sound/music
• Fixed point math
• Sine/cosine lookup table optimizations
• BMP, LBM, GIF image loading (and saving?)

DJGPP Toolchain

Along the same theme as this library itself, I am using an older version of DJGPP from the late 90's. I have not tested with any other versions of the DJGPP toolchain other than:

15 Jan 1998   bnu281b.zip
24 Oct 1997   csdpmi4b.zip
31 Oct 1996   djdev201.zip
18 Jan 1997   faq210b.zip
 6 Jun 1998   gcc281b.zip
18 Oct 1996   gdb416b.zip
 6 Jun 1998   gpp281b.zip
 1 Mar 1998   mak3761b.zip
30 Sep 1997   rhide14b.zip

This is a pretty arbitrary selection that was based on a cut-off of about 1998 (which was when I first came across DJGPP when I was younger).