Yes. DJGPP and Allegro was a great help, and a big step up from the old Borland Turbo Pascal I started out with. I remember trying to rotate an image pixel by pixel in Pascal. Allegro simply had a function to do it. And yes, the mailing list was great - Shawn Hargreaves and the couple of people in the inner circle (I seem to remember someone called George) were simply awesome, helpful people.

I eventually installed Red Hat, started at university and lost most of my free time to study projects.

I was quite active in the Allegro community around that time, mostly on the allegro.cc forums - but I was still a 14-year old learning the ropes back then. Missed out on DJGPP, it was already MinGW under Windows for me.

I took part in a few of the later Speedhacks, around 2004-2005, I think?

Allegro will always have a warm place in my heart, and it was a formative experience that still informs how I like to work on games.

EDIT: Hah, actually found my first Speedhack [1]! Second place, not bad! Interestingly, the person who took first place (Rodrigo Braz Monteiro) is also a professional game developer now.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071101091657/http://speedhack....

I was, but my application was less fun: porting Perl code from Windows NT to MS-DOS to integrate with software that required direct hardware access to a particular model of SCSI card.

Worked great, and saved a bunch of time vs writing a VDD to enable direct hardware access from NTVDM or a miniport driver from scratch.

IIRC, the underlying problem was that none of the NT drivers for any of the cards we'd tested were able to reliably allocate enough sufficiently contiguous memory to read tapes with unusually large (multi-megabyte) block sizes.

I was on BlitzCoder.