Gosh I remember trying to wrap my head around this and Allegro in my early teens. Specifically for use with Mugen.

Years later I learned SDL/SDL2 and found them much much easier.

Same, Allegro was very impressive, and I built a little game in it. However, I remember I got stuck on something that I didn't quite fully understand at the time. Hell of a lot of fun though.

Re SDL - exactly! Same path.

It's been years since I wanted to play around making a game. I was thinking of building something in the love 2d framework now. What do you think of that?

That's funny, I always found allegro (4 or 5) easier than SDL. Allegro's performance had some issues for me, which is why I switched.

Agree, it is all fuzzy now, but I remember allegro docs being very good.

Yeah, that and it wasn't as low-level as SDL. You didn't have to manage your draw instance, textures, screen flipping, frame locking/time deltas etc. It was much more conducive to the paradigms of what a game loop actually looks like.

But, for those same reasons, if you did something crazy (like I did with my first isomorphic engine), it could quickly get unmanageable with resource leaks.

Nowadays, I just recommend raylib, if you want a more "game"-oriented (vs "graphics"-oriented) library. I just wish someone would expand the docs so it wasn't as difficult for new gamedevs to jump in.