I think SDL is very useful and is an ideal platform if you're
doing bitmap manipulation. If you start looking at the Win95
DDK with a view to writing an accelerated driver, the
recommended basic GDI functions they think you should implement
are BitBlt, StretchBlt, PatBlt and simple line drawing (as well
as hardware cursor drawing). You could do all this with SDL
but you're going to end up writing your own equivalents of
PatBlt etc. in code. This will work but it won't be accelerated
in any way (whereas the OpenGL/GDI/XLib version might be).
Mike.
> > For basic 2D accleration though you're probably not going
> > to beat coding to XLib/GDI directly.
> When I wrote the patch for the bochs gui code to use SDL instead of X, it
> wasn't really faster (just as you suggest) but the advantage of SDL is
> that I could run it on svgalib or fbdev instead, which is faster and is
> useful for some people. IMHO, SDL is the best way to go (for 2D
> acceleration at least) as it is likely to wrap any useful target ppl are
> likely to want (now AND in future) at negligable cost (performance wise)
> and with little or no extra work from us.
> Martin.
