Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.3 Wiki

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

1. Using the SDL documentation Wiki

Use the links under the Navigation Links heading on the left-hand menu to access:

• API reference by name or by category

• tutorials

• articles

• books

• FAQs

• forums

Registered users can use the Edit links under the Page Actions heading on the left-hand menu to add or update content in the wiki. For help using the editing functions see the MoinMoin Wiki Help pages, also available at any time from the Wiki Help link under the Navigation Links heading.

2. Introduction to SDL

2.1. What is SDL?

The Simple DirectMedia Layer library (SDL) is a general API that provides low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D framebuffer across multiple platforms.

The current version (1.3) supports Windows, Windows CE, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, and QNX. The code contains support for other operating systems but these are not officially supported.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, C#, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria, Guile, Haskell, Java, Lisp, Lua, ML, Objective C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Pike, Pliant, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

This library is distributed under GNU LGPL [<- link to licensing info] version 2. This license allows you to use SDL freely in commercial programs as long as you link with the dynamic library. A full commercial license for SDL 1.3 is available from Galaxy Gameworks.

2.2. 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
• Window Management
• Rendering

Input

• Events provided for:
  • Application visibility changes
  • Keyboard input
  • Mouse input
  • Joystick 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

Force Feedback

• Force feedback is supported under Windows, Mac OSX and Linux

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

File I/O Abstraction

• General purpose abstraction for opening, reading and writing data
• Built-in support for files and memory

Shared Object Support

• Load shared objects (DLL on Windows, .dylib on Mac OSX, .so on Linux)
• Lookup functions in shared objects

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

CPU Feature Detection

• Detect MMX, SSE, 3DNow and AltiVec CPU features

Power Management

• Querying power management status

Endian Independence

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

2.3. What platforms does SDL run on?

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 !Direct3D for video display, taking advantage of modern hardware acceleration

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

Mac OSX

• Uses Cocoa for video display, taking advantage of OpenGL for hardware acceleration
• Uses Core Audio for sound

Linux

• Uses X11 for video display, taking advantage of OpenGL for hardware acceleration

• Uses the ALSA, OSS and PulseAudio APIs for sound

3. 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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