Mason Wheeler to sdl I updated SDL, and suddenly my SDL frames stopped working. They'd "initialize" full of gibberish, and I couldn't render anything to them. After a bit of digging, I found a problem: the renderer initialization routine in my SDL frame code wasn't getting called anymore. procedure TSdlFrame.Paint; begin if SDL_SelectRenderer(FWindowID) = -1 then CreateRenderer; SDL_RenderPresent; end; function TSdlFrame.CreateRenderer: boolean; const pf: tagPIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR = (nSize: sizeof(pf); nVersion: 1; dwFlags: PFD_DRAW_TO_WINDOW or PFD_SUPPORT_OPENGL or PFD_DOUBLEBUFFER; iPixelType: PFD_TYPE_RGBA; cColorBits: 24; cAlphaBits: 8; iLayerType: PFD_MAIN_PLANE); RENDERERS: array[TRendererType] of AnsiString = ('software', 'gdi', 'opengl', 'd3d'); var pFormat: integer; begin if (SDL_SelectRenderer(FWindowID) = 0) then begin result := true; Exit; end; if FRendererType = rtOpenGL then begin pFormat := ChoosePixelFormat(canvas.Handle, @pf); if not SetPixelFormat(canvas.Handle, pFormat, @pf) then outputDebugString(PChar(SysErrorMessage(GetLastError))); if wglCreateContext(canvas.Handle) = 0 then outputDebugString(PChar(SysErrorMessage(GetLastError))); end; if (SDL_CreateRenderer(FWindowID, SDL_RendererIndex(RENDERERS[FRendererType]), [sdlrPresentFlip3, sdlrAccelerated]) = 0) then begin SDL_ShowWindow(FWindowID); assert(SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(0, 0, 0, 255) = 0); FFlags := SDL_GetWindowFlags(FWindowID); if assigned(FOnAvailable) then FOnAvailable(self); end else outputDebugString(pChar(format('SDL_CreateRenderer failed: %s', [sdl_GetError]))); result := SDL_SelectRenderer(FWindowID) = 0; end; This is a critical issue. The Paint method gets called when the control receives a WM_PAINT message from Windows. I can't create the renderer before then, or it will fail and cause trouble. And when I do create it, it needs to be created with certain parameters. So imagine my surprise when I started debugging into the DLL and found that SDL_SelectRenderer was trying to be "helpful" by creating the renderer for me if it didn't already exist! Now not only does my initialization code not get called, I end up with the wrong renderer and so things don't render as expected when I try to use the window.

The reason these libraries are built outside of the standard XFree86
tree is so that they can be linked as shared object code directly into
SDL without causing any symbol collisions with code in the application.

You can't link static library code into shared libraries on non-x86
Linux platforms.  Since these libraries haven't become standard yet,
we'll just include them directly.

These sources are synchronized with XFree86 4.2.1