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Date:	Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:49:55 +0200
From:	Mateusz Viste <mateusz DOT viste AT delorie DOT com>
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Subject:	Re: Could SDL breathe new life into DJGPP?
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Hello Rod,

I am pretty sure that having a SDL port for DOS would indeed bring some 
fresh air to the DJGPP/DOS world, at least as far as gaming is 
concerned. There are plenty of games out there that are written against 
SDL, so having a DOS SDL port would allow to port them all to DOS, often 
without much troubles.

Note however, that SDL2 heavily relies on hardware acceleration, thus I 
can only guess that such a DOS port would have to fall back on software 
backends, making many games unplayable due to poor performances...

At some point I was even wondering about doing such SDL port to make my 
Atomiks game compileable under DOS, but I quickly forgot about that 
crazy idea when I saw the HUGE task it actually would be to port the SDL 
codebase on DOS... It would require a programmer to work for quite a 
long time (weeks at least, if not months), and it would need to be a 
pretty good one on top of that (ie. experienced with the DOS hardware 
ins and outs)... Most probably not something one can achieve in his 'few 
hours per week spare time'.

On the other hand, there are emulation solutions out there (namely 
Japheth's HXDOS) that already provide the ability to run some 
SDL-powered games, along with the windows version of SDL, by emulating 
all the necessary GDI stuff. So this might be a less time costing way to 
achieve a similar goal..

cheers,
Mateusz



On 07/11/2014 10:20 AM, Rod Pemberton wrote:
>
> Could SDL breathe new life into DJGPP?
>
> I know this has been brought up in the past.
> I can also find posts from 2004 to 2013 on
> various gaming and DOS forums via Google and
> Yahoo about people wanting a DOS port of SDL.
>
> E.g., supposedly all of these now can use SDL:
>
> Allegro
> Doom, e.g., SDLDoom, Doom Legacy 1.4x SDL, PrBoom, etc.
> EDuke32 (Duke Nukem)
> Exult (Ultima)
> VICE (C64)
> ScummVM
> MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)
> MESS (Multi Emulator Super System)
> DOSBox
> dosemu
>
> I'm sure there are others too.
>
>
> Rod Pemberton

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