SDL and GameShell

Developers
1

I was on the fence about pre-ordering the game shell for a bit, largely due to the high shipping cost. However the Black Friday deal made it viable for me, though I hope I can get a light key later. Now I want to get a jump start on the reason I’m getting one… Game Dev!

I started a project a while back on my Raspberry Pi using C++ and SDL while following this tutorial:

http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/

Is anyone else doing something similar? I’m curious how well SDL works on the GameShell. I’ve heard it’s used in many emulators and I think even RetroArch so I was thinking it’d be fine. My only concern is that it seems the OpenGL ES support for the Mali GPU isn’t working in Clockwork Pi yet, which is pretty disappointing for me, but not a complete deal breaker at the moment.

I believe SDL’s render methods are the ones that utilize hardware/OpenGL, but it’s blitting methods in SDL_Surface are done in software. Can anyone who may know SDL better than me confirm this? Or can anyone tell me if the render methods still work on the GameShell even though the OpenGL / OpenGL ES drivers aren’t there?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Can’t comment on using SDL directly but I use LÖVE which uses SDL and I’ve not experienced any issues, so I imagine it’ll be fine.

Sorry I don’t have more info!

3

Thanks for the response! I didn’t know LÖVE used it. I’m looking forward to getting mine so I can try this out, but it gives me motivation to restart my project to have something ready.

4

Yes SDL work.

That would be a real issue if SDL was not working.

SDL can be 100% software rendering (and it was for a long time, OpenGL support is “recent”)
In fact, I don’t even remember is SDL 1.2 was supporting OpenGL. Support has been added for sure in SDL 2, but that is not the only backend. It also support framebuffers, X rendering and other things.