Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.3 Wiki

This wiki is your portal to documentation and other resources for SDL 1.3.

Using the SDL documentation Wiki

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Introduction to SDL

What is SDL?

SDL is a free cross-platform multi-media development API, used for games, game SDK's, emulators, MPEG players and other applcations.

What can SDL do?

Video

• Set a video mode at any depth (8-bpp or greater) with optional conversion, if the video mode is not supported by the hardware.
• Write directly to a linear graphics framebuffer.
• Create surfaces with colorkey or alpha blending attributes.
• Surface blits are automatically converted to the target format using optimized blitters and are hardware accelerated, when possible. MMX optimized blits are available for the x86.
• Hardware accelerated blit and fill operations are used if supported by the hardware.

Events

• Events provided for:
  • Application visibility changes
  • Keyboard input
  • Mouse input
  • User-requested quit

• Each event can be enabled or disabled with SDL_EventState().

• Events are passed through a user-specified filter function before being posted to the internal event queue.
• Thread-safe event queue.

Audio

• Set audio playback of 8-bit and 16-bit audio, mono or stereo, with optional conversion if the format is not supported by the hardware.
• Audio runs independently in a separate thread, filled via a user callback mechanism.
• Designed for custom software audio mixers, but the example archive contains a complete audio/music output library.

Threads

• Simple thread creation API
• Simple binary semaphores for synchronization

Timers

• Get the number of milliseconds elapsed
• Wait a specified number of milliseconds
• Set a single periodic timer with 10ms resolution

Endian Independence

• Detect the endianness of the current system
• Routines for fast swapping of data values
• Read and write data of a specified endianness

What platforms does SDL run on?

Linux

• Uses X11 for video display, taking advantage of XFree86 DGA extensions and new MTRR acceleration for fullscreen display.
• Uses the OSS API for sound.
• Threads are implemented using either the clone() system call and SysV IPC, or glibc-2.1 pthreads.

Windows

• Two versions, one safe for all systems based on Win32 APIs, and one with higher performance, based on DirectX APIs.

• Safe version uses GDI for video display. High performance version uses DirectDraw for video display, taking advantage of hardware acceleration if available.

• Safe version uses waveOut APIs for sound. High performace version uses DirectSound for audio playback.

Mac OS

• more info?

Special features in SDL 1.3

• Full 3D hardware acceleration
• Support for OpenGL 3.0
• Support for multiple windows
• Support for multiple displays
• Support for multiple mice, tablets, etc.
• Force Feedback available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

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