Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 15:17:27 +0300 (EEST) From: Hannu Savolainen Subject: Re: SDL uses obsolete OSS features I did some work on getting OSS to work better with SDL. There have been some problems with select which should be fixed now. I'm having some problems in understanding what is the purpose of the DSP_WaitAudio() routine. I added a return to the very beginning of this routine and commendted out the define for USE_BLOCKING_WRITES. At least lbreakout2 seems to work as well as earlier. The latencies are the same. An ordinary blocking write does exactly the same thing than DSP_WaitAudio does. So I would recommend using the USE_BLOCKING_WRITES approach and removing everything from the DSP_WaitAudio routine. Also enabling USE_BLOCKING_WRITES makes it possible to simplify DSP_PlayAudio() because you don't need to handle the partial writes (the do-while loop). Attached is a patch against SDL-1.2.7. After these changes SDL will use OSS as it's designed to be used (make it as simple as possible). This code should work with all OSS implementations because it uses only the very fundamental features that have been there since the jurassic times.

Wish list for the 1.3 development branch:

 * Use /etc/fb.modes, if available, like GGI does
 * Add mousewheel events (new unified event architecture?)
 * DirectInput joystick support needs to be implemented
 * Be able to enumerate and select available audio and video drivers
 * Fullscreen video mode support for MacOS X
 * Explicit vertical retrace wait (maybe separate from SDL_Flip?)
 * Shaped windows, windows without borders
 * Multiple windows, multiple display support
 * SDL_INIT_EVENTTHREAD on Windows and MacOS?
 * Add a timestamp to events
 * Use RDTSC for timer resolution on x86 hardware
 * Add audio input API
 * Add hardware accelerated scaled blit
 * Add hardware accelerated alpha blits
 * Redesign blitting architecture to allow blit plugins

In the jump from 1.2 to 1.3, we should change the SDL_Rect members to
int and evaluate all the rest of the datatypes.  This is the only place
we should do it though, since the 1.2 series should not break binary
compatibility in this way.

Requests:
 * PCM and CDROM volume control (deprecated, but possible)