AmigaSDL

While a solo effort, Frank Mariak provided valuable information on CGX hardware acceleration and the author of SDL, Sam Lantinga, offered useful information to keep the Amiga port behaviour consistent with other platforms. OpenGL support, mentioned earlier, for the Amiga SDL port is being worked on by another developer and will hopefully be available sometime soon - which should open up further avenues for Amiga-based development with SDL.

The complete system was released on Aminet recently, and should be combined with the official SDL sources shortly - the adventurous can already access the AmigaOS code from the (unstable) current CVS releases on the SDL website. The unadventurous should stick to the stable Aminet releases for the moment.

To take advantage of the full features of SDL, the AmigaOS port requires CyberGraphX (Picasso96 compatibility is untested) for video support and AHI for sound support. PowerPC Amigas are not currently supported, but will be catered for in the near future. AmigaSDL is ready for SAS/C and GCC development environments, though it shouldn't be too much trouble to support other C/C++ compilers and even other development languages - SDL can already be used from a rich variety of languages on other platforms such as Python, Perl, Eiffel, Ada, Java, so the groundwork is already in place.

Documentation on developing code that uses SDL can be found on the official website, or within the docs directory of the Aminet release. Mailing lists and other official sources of support can be found on the official site - there aren't any Amiga-specific lists at the moment, but then it is supposed to be a cross- platform library and therefore developers shouldn't really need platform-specific support anyway.

Of course, one of the best introductions to SDL is to have a go at porting some of the many games and applications available using the SDL library - a couple of examples are provided with the Aminet release, but there are more out there. Take a look at the official website for a better selection.

So developers, what are you waiting for?

Gabriele's AmigaSDL page: http://ggreco.interfree.it/sdl.html

Official SDL Website: http://www.libsdl.org/

Binaries from Aminet (UK): /dev/misc/AmigaSDL.lha

Sources from Aminet (UK): /dev/misc/AmigaSDLsrc.lha

My thanks to Gabriele Greco for assistance with this article.

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