To a certain extent, I have made scrolling games, but they have distinct limitations that would not be suitable for a Z3 clone.
https://github.com/Z...RPG/ScrollingZC
I designed this for a Dragon Quest type of game.
As for Solarus, it is not all that easy to use. Everything requires Lua scripting, but it's solid enough. Chistopho is a good man, and you should certainly look at his software.
As for the ZC engine, this is not a total rewrite, but it is a major refactor and not happening anytime soon. It is not an Allegro issue--Allegro can support it--but too many things depend on fixed screen dimensions and I would not be sure where to begin o add larger screen sizes in an effective manner. I saw where this was started and planned for a uture version, but outside of making some screen vars such as height and width, nothing else exists to make it functional.
In general, ZC is designed to emulate 8b games, and does not have scrolling HW simulation built in a this time. There is a general behind the scenes plan to merge ZC and Solarus for ZC v4, with an intermediate layer that runs the appropriate engine based on whether the quest is made for 3.x or earlier, or 4.x or later; and of course to make Solarus easier t use, bu that is a long way off. The general plan of this is outlined in severa documents distributed with ZC, filename __future_logic_diagram.txt.
Premise:
Allegro 5 is the main lib.
All Allegro 4 stuff is handled by Allegro Legacy, linked to AG5
CLassic Quests play in a background running process of ZC 3.xx (Legacy Environment)
on top of ZC4 (New Environment).
New quests run entirely on new environment.
No emulation is needed, nor do new quests need to maintain compatibility with
legacy quests, as the old software runs invisible over the new, with input and video
output being translated.
All old quests run in this 'Blue Box' module, running on top of 'Yellow Box', invisibly to the user.
INPUT VIDEO bitmap +-----------------> Display
----- ------------------------
V ^ Modern Audio Output +-------> System Audio Devices
V ^ +---------+-----------
V ^ | ^
V ^ ^
V ^ ^
+---------+-+<<<<<<<<<+-------------------------------
| | | Legacy Audio and RAM Bitmaps |
| Allegro | ------+-------------------------
| 5 | ^
| Library | --------+--------- -------------
| +<<<----+ Allegro Legacy +->**<-+ ALLEGRO 4 | * Linked via AL
| | ---------+---+---- -------------
------------- | ^
^ | ^
| | ^
| | |-----------------
^ Blue/Yellow Layer |---+ RAM Bitmaps |
| --------->>>>>>+ | | Old Quest Data |
| | Read Into* V | ------------------
------+---+---- ----+---+---------
| ZC Rerwite | | Zelda Classic |
| Engine | | ZQuest |
| Yellow Box | | Blue Box |
------+----+--- ----+---+---------
^ ^ Read Into* V ^
^ ^<<<<<<<<-----+ ^
------------- ^
| New Type | ^
------------- ^
^ ^
------+-------- ------+-----------
| Quest Type |=====>>>+ OLD QUEST TYPE |
--------------- ------------------
*Old quest read into ZC4, loads classic ZC3 engine in the baqckground.
This background layer pipes new input in