Well you know what wd would say. 😀

I know 😀

Oh i feel the need to reply 😉

Sadly the SDL people switched to 1.3 development (which still is in beta
stage yet said to be "quite far"), leaving 1.2.x more or less as-is which
still is not in a too nice state.
Anybody got some experience with api compatibility (how to port)? As there
should be co-existence unless 1.3 turns out to be the god of backends.

Not the answer I expected 😀

I'm not sure whether 1.3 will ever leave beta and I'm also not sure whether 1.2x will ever evolve 😀
Right now, OS X 10.6 is the only real show stopper for SDL 1.2.x, just maybe it will be enough motivation for more OS software to be 1.3 compatible... Right now it is a real mess 🙁

I've only followed 1.2.x development, yet there are some messages where
they preferred to not break 1.2.x api compatibility when discussing some 1.3
stuff. Still might be a lot work to switch, dunno.

We have been doing some work on the pandora/wiz with SDL 1.3, I havnt spent a ton of time with it, but there is a new API in 1.3 that will work better in getting windows for OPENGL/OPENGLES, basically its a best API that can cover more systems and arch's.

I believe it would be in the best interest that dosbox reworks to support the new API, as it would allow more systems to have hw accelerated rendering. Although it may not be a good idea until the SDL team gets closer to an actual release.

As far as I can tell though SDL 1.3 still has the old API functions in it, that may be for now. I dont know if they will be removed later or not.
Also at least on linux systems SDL is setup through sdl-config, does MAC systems have the same thing? If can change that then you can point to any SDL you want, or even change the makefile after its been generated.

Would using SDL 1.3 limit older OS support?

As far as I know it wouldnt since 1.3 should be backwards compatible with 1.2, for dosbox to be everything to all people its possible 1.3 code could be preprocessed out depending on the version of SDL detected.
But thats if dosbox adds 1.3 only API. I dont see any reason why the 1.2 code shoudlnt work on a 1.3 library.

Switching straight to SDL 1.3 probably will need some coding. Not everything is compatible, even though mostly it needs small changes.
I ran into this, when I tried to compile Pentagram (http://pentagram.sf.net) with SDL 1.3. Some ints needed to be long ints, others size_t and then compiling broke on another SDL problem...

Oh, and there is actually movement on the SDL front http://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581

SDL 1.3 will have some nasty surprises btw. like
http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl. … ber/071878.html
which sort of disqualifies the Simple DirectMedia Layer as Media layer
but just an audio/video interface at best.

DosFreak wrote:

Would using SDL 1.3 limit older OS support?

I sure hope not as I do use DOSBox on my 9x machines for covering the CGA speed gap.

There surely should be the possibility to compile against both library versions.

Anybody who's interested to work on this please let me know.

A status update for OS X 10.6.1:
SVN of SDL 1.2 is compiling now, as well as SDL_Sound, Dosbox needs a little patch in src/gui/midi_coreaudio.h so it #include <CoreServices/CoreServices.h>
Then Dosbox won't compile because of several bitu whatever errors, I'll report more some other time 😀
And probably need to go to another thread for this 😀
Should I file a tracker report for the missing include? (this include do several other projects miss as well, btw, so it is standard problem/solution by now 😀)