[OLPC-Games] SDL improvements...

[Ben Sawyer]

Hi Ryan,

You should definitely coordinate with Kent Quirk who is on this list  
but probably hasn't woken up yet.

I know for me from what I've observed of the discussions we've had so  
far that one of the issues out there is how the OLPC hardware handles  
color and RGB translation to its screen in color mode.

I think also if there are ways to provide tools that might be special  
to the 1200x800 b&w mode might be worth brainstorming.

In the case of color... there may be some code specific things there  
that can help developers especially when they are trying to create  
pixel-perfect artwork for the machines for things like interfaces, etc.

I don't have my head fully wrapped around that all but that was a low- 
level issue that's come up a bit.  Another lower level point people  
have talked about is the hardware scaling instructions on the AMD CPU  
and what that might offer if optimized for.

There is also the input capabilities of the system with the game  
keys, the extended stylus, and the USB ports which can be used for  
probes, etc.

 From a Docs perspective for other developers while I understand the  
sentiment is not to Fork SDL for OLPC anything you can dump into the  
Wiki or post here that would be of special interest to OLPC  
developers working with SDL running on the laptops be it special or  
just quirky and needed to be noted would be extremely helpful.  We do  
want to eventually have something of a developer doc for game  
developers as things rapidly progress.

- Ben Sawyer


On Apr 14, 2007, at 1:29 AM, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:

>
> Hi, my name is Ryan and I just got a developer system, so I wanted to
> drop in and say hello here.
>
> I'm a primary developer of SDL, and will be spending some time
> optimizing it for the olpc hardware.
>
> If anyone has a good patch for SDL, send it my way and I'll commit  
> it to
> the upstream Subversion repository. Ideally I'd like to avoid  
> having an
> "olpc" fork if possible, especially since it already works on the
> hardware without patches, so I definitely want to collect up any good
> work people do and merge it with the mainline.
>
> I'm also interested in hearing about use cases on the hardware...what
> surface and audio formats people tend to use, since most optimization
> will be in tuning the blitters, etc.
>
> I'll also be working on patches to remove all polling from
> SDL_WaitEvent(), so it will be possible to construct a "well-behaved"
> SDL program that can permanently yield the CPU until something
> interesting happens.
>
> Other suggestions and patches for SDL improvements are welcome, too.
>
> Thanks,
> --ryan.
>
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