X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:49:55 +0200 From: Mateusz Viste User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Could SDL breathe new life into DJGPP? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 59 Message-ID: <53bfa533$0$2298$426a74cc@news.free.fr> Organization: Guest of ProXad - France NNTP-Posting-Date: 11 Jul 2014 10:49:55 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.225.72.113 X-Trace: 1405068595 news-1.free.fr 2298 82.225.72.113:56704 X-Complaints-To: abuse AT proxad DOT net Bytes: 3021 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com 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