Question

For some reason the XNA Game Studio doesn’t work on my PC. 🙁 . It says something about pixel shaders and my hardware doesn’t support something or the other. I just need to make some decent 2D games and demos. Neither do I think it will work on the PCs of my intended audience ( people from developing south-asian countries).

So is there any alternative for XNA that gives me equal performance and has a mature enough API?

Answer 1

You could check out Allegro (a game programming library)

Edit to provide more information:

Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 are cross-platform, libraries mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming. They handle common, low-level tasks such as creating windows, accepting user input, loading data, drawing images, playing sounds, etc. and generally abstracting away the underlying platform. However, Allegro is not a game engine: you are free to design and structure your program as you like.

Allegro 4 and 5 support the major OSs (Unix/Linux, Windows (MSVC, MinGW) and MacOS X). The engine supports 2D graphics primitives natively (you will need a separate API, like OpenGL or DirectX for 3D rendering, but you said that is not your target).