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AmigaSDL

© John Chandler

Games and multimedia applications are often trickier to maintain between multiple platforms, particularly under less-familiar or unusual platforms. There are a variety of cross-platform libraries out there attempting to fill this gap, but SDL is probably the most elegant and well-supported project out there. It has fitted in nicely as a way to offer developers a powerful and portable environment for cross-platform development - and as such, it's great to see that AmigaOS now has an SDL port available to it, thanks to the recent work of long-time Amiga developer Gabriele Greco.

The AmigaOS port joins a wealth of other platforms, including: Linux and the BSDs, Win32, BeOS, QNX RtP, MacOS, MacOS X and a variety of other UNIX-a-likes - MorphOS is believed to be gaining support pretty soon and you may recall SDL support was mentioned in the recent article on the RealityStation. With such wide-ranging coverage, it opens up a lot of scope for Amiga developers ›who want to broaden their list of supported platforms, as well as provide Amiga-savvy developers with an added incentive to include AmigaOS support with the minimum of fuss.

Having had a play around with SDL under Linux Mandrake recently, it's apparent this is a very clean, well thought out API backed by good documentation which is actually kept up-to-date! It's been a while since I encountered a project such as this which hasn't given a really outdated set of documentation followed by "read the source for details" only to find the source cryptic and lacking in useful information.

The SDL API offers access to the main areas you would expect for this type of development work and gives fairly low-level access without, obviously, sacrificing the portability. Video support allows 8-bit or greater screens, varying resolutions, transparent handling of hardware acceleration including MMX support under x86 platforms, plus OpenGL (not currently implemented in the AmigaOS port). Event handling code deals with a variety of input devices such as mice, keyboards and joysticks. Sound, including CD audio, is also provided along with thread and timer support, as well as platform compatibility functionality for handling machine-endianness issues in a fast and efficient manner. As open source software, functionality is improving all the time and development is continuing at a healthy pace.

After evaluating a variety of cross-platform libraries last year, SDL was chosen for the port of Gabriele's game "Eat The Whistle" to Linux and Win32. Seeing the game running on an Amiga with LinuxPPC, the decision was made to maintain AmigaOS compatibility through a port of SDL. Work began in July of last year, and a beta version was complete by August. From then on, work continued during

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