libDGL

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

The project is developed with Watcom C 10.0b and Borland Turbo Assembler 4.0.

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
• Input device (keyboard/mouse) events
• PCX loading/saving
• Math library (general helpers, 2D vector, 3x3 matrix)
• Fixed point math
• 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
• Sine/cosine lookup table optimizations
• BMP, LBM, GIF image loading (and saving?)
• Simple immediate mode GUI

Building

You can use WMAKE to build using the included MAKEFILE.

To build the library:

> wmake target_config=debug build           ; debug build

> wmake target_config=release build         ; release build

Will output DGL.LIB in the project directory.

To build and run the (incomplete) test suite, look under the "TEST" directory. There you will find a separate MAKEFILE which assumes that you are running wmake from that directory and that DGL.LIB has already been built.

> cd test
test> wmake run                                 ; run test suite
test> wmake debug                               ; run through WD debugger