Allegro

This was one of the big days: a lot of the remaining Allegro-era runtime code was ripped out or replaced, input moved further onto SDL with proper scancode mapping and joystick support, sound and renderer code lost more legacy baggage, and the project felt much more committed to its SDL2 future. Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot did most of the heavy lifting on the broad refactors, while I learned the increasingly useful skill of telling when the robots were being genuinely helpful and when they were just very energetically wrong.

Today was a reminder that sometimes progress looks like deleting code without setting the building on fire: unused texture and blending functions were cut, display scaling was simplified, and the SDL2 renderer path got less tangled up with leftovers from the Allegro/OpenGL era. This was also good coding-agent territory, because Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot are quite happy to take first passes at pruning and simplification, provided you keep a close eye on them and make sure they have not removed some bizarre old ritual that was secretly keeping the whole game stable.

This was the “can this ancient thing even run on modern Linux?” day, and the answer turned out to be “yes, but only after a lot of persuasion.” The first rescue pass got the recovered WizBall remake compiling, added sanitizer builds, cleaned out generated junk, hardened data and tilemap loading, added scripting diagnostics, updated the Linux audio side to newer FMOD APIs, and generally stopped the game from falling over at startup; a wonderfully specific frame-0 portal bug also died here, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes old game code sound haunted.