SDL or ALLEGRO?

They both try really hard but I think AllegroGL is just a front-end for Allegro Scene-render which is an MMX accelerated CPU-based graphics plotter. SDL just sets up an OpenGL context and lets the drivers have nearly unfiltered direct access to the hardware. In short, regarding OpenGL: I think Allegro is safer but SDL gives more direct access to the hardware.

As for OpenAL, there is no support for OpenAL in either API. You can use it with either as an independent sound engine but you have to reallize, it is not from the same people that develop OpenGL and therefore won't have the industry-wide support like I would anticipate OpenSL (for Open Sound Library) will have since OpenSL is from the Khronos organization.

To totally dodge the question, I like GLFW better than either. It doesn't do audio, but then you mentioned OpenAL. Also, irrKlang is looking quite promising for audio. To answer the question, if you are just using SDL for window setup, input, timers, etc. and using OpenGL for all rendering, then I think it is a better choice than Allegro.

Why do big game titles like Quake's, DOOM3, F.E.A.R, Serious Sam, Warhammer 40K, ...etc. etc. etc. not condier using SDL? They will be portable! Is there something bad in using SDL or such libs to wrap the internals of the system?

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Original post by eSam Why do big game titles like Quake's, DOOM3, F.E.A.R, Serious Sam, Warhammer 40K, ...etc. etc. etc. not condier using SDL? They will be portable! Is there something bad in using SDL or such libs to wrap the internals of the system?

For the Linux ports, they do.

Hum, elaborate on your question.
SDL or Allegro, see both, which API has the most appeal to you, etc...

If you're going with opengl I'd go for something like GLFW.

Quake 4 on linux. It used SDL.

But remember for graphics they used opengl, and used SDL for creating the window and retrieving extensions. SDL really gets out of the way for opengl.

I would recommend SDL to anyone. I dont know about allegro, I havent used it.

I think Allegro is more "newbie" friendly,
more comes ready out of the box, including simple fonts, GUI, sound, gfx procedures (line, circle, etc..).

SDL- is more lowlevel, gives you access to more things (such as multi threading and network), but not to sound/fonts/gfx (you need extra libraries for those).