Re: SDL

I received a number of comments on my previous blog post. I was going to reply to each of them separately, but then decided that this was worthy of a blog post of its own.

Two people posted comments telling me to check whether I had OpenGL acceleration switched on.

In case you guys missed it, Freetennis is a sprite-based and essentially 2D game. It does not use OpenGL, by the looks of it. Neither does starfighter, powermanga, or a number of other 2D games I tried. Yet they all require the full 1.3Ghz of my processor, and some of them, including freetennis, think even that isn't enough.

I received some other claim that SDL by itself performs pretty well. While this may be true, the fact remains that many simple games that should work well on older hardware seem to require a lot of CPU time, and that they all seem to use SDL. If it's not SDL at fault, then it's probably the SDL documentation which doesn't stress the need to KISS enough. Or so.

A final remark compared the situation to Quake2 on his X40. I don't know what you've been doing, but I'd been happily playing Quake2 on my 650Mhz PentiumIII until that one got migrated to become my parent's computer. Without hardware acceleration. And, luckily, without SDL, too.