Episode 6 - Shawn Hargreaves

Shawn Hargreaves talks about the Allegro game programming library and the community that sprung up around it in the late 1990s. We talk about what happens when your hobby project accidentally turns into something with a life of its own, the inexplicable popularity of games involving the murder of Barney the Dinosaur, and the vital role of accessible tooling in providing a path to learning.

Show notes

• Oric Atmos
• Allegro home page, April 1997
• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice
• PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia
• Denthor of Asphyxia
• Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days (CD-ROM)
• Near / far pointers
• DJGPP
• CWSDPMI DOS extender
• FreeBE/AF
• No more "Swapware"
• Barney Mutilator (alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die)
• Kill the Barney (Play online)
• NeoPaint
• Teen Programmers Unite (Original usenet post)
• Simtel / cdrom.com
• Shawn told me the flightsim game he liked was not Triplane Turmoil (play online), and I haven't been able to dig up anything more plausible, so please leave a comment in the forums if you've got a guess!
• Allegro 3.11 FAQ
• An example of a blatantly-didn't-read-the-documentation question I posted to usenet that got many helpful responses
• allegro.cc community
• Allegro Speedhack game jam (Shawn's first entry, second)
• Allegro contributor list
• Allegro add-ons / library extensions
• PCX file format
• MikMod and Mikalleg
• Scream Tracker (Wikipedia)
• Impulse Tracker (First-hand account of its creation: 1, 2, 3, 4)
• DIGMID patch sets
• XNA Game Studio
• Avatar Fart, a representative example of the "fart game" on XBLIG. See also Rocket Fart, Surround Sound RC Gopher Farting Masseuse, and of course, Try Not To Fart.
• Shawn's current website
• Garret Thomson's 1997 MIDI licensing webpage, including download links for Sorcerer and Demonics, the two pieces used in the Allegro demo game
• Garret Thomson's current SoundCloud