Re: [hatari-devel] Feedback SDL2 support

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxx>]

 Hi Matthias,

thanks for testing the SDL2 support!

Am Thu, 14 May 2015 10:29:34 +0200
schrieb Matthias Arndt <marndt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Hello all,
> 
> after quite some time, I tried to build Hatari with SDL2 support.
> 
> Basically it seems to work, on my classic 4:3 TFT I get black borders
> on top and bottom only now which is an improvement. Latest SDL1 build
> shows extra black borders beyond the emulated ST borders here.
> 
> Keyboard and joystick input seem to work however I haven't checked all
> possible configurations or use cases yet.
> 
> What about OpenGL support? Is this implicitly used as my build does
> not link against any libGL?

Hatari does not directly use OpenGL, but the so-called SDL2 renderer.
SDL2 now supports different "renders", one of them is OpenGL - probably
used by default on Linux if available.
You can choose the renderer by setting an environment variable, e.g.:

export SDL_RENDER_DRIVER=opengl
or:
export SDL_RENDER_DRIVER=software

> However I found a few annoying points:
> - a start of Hatari in fullscreen, I see garbage content in the Hatari
> screen array for ST screen, shortly before the first screen content is
> drawn. Is this a SDL2 effect/feature/bug for videomode change?

I don't get that here ... likely a bug with your SDL2 driver, I guess.

> - Why do I have to explicitly mark "use linear scaling"? This should
> be the default for SDL2 as  it is supposed to adapt better to the
> screen mode and monitor characteristics.

Hatari uses the default from SDL2 by default, too. If you don't like
that, simply save your settings.

> - Besides marking "Use VSync" I get VBL ripple effects in the lower
> border which are more prominent compared to the old SDL1 build. I had
> hoped for more smoothness here.

There's nothing we can do here on the Hatari side. It's all SDL.

> Otherwise, I think the SDL2 direction is correct and should become the
> default in the next major release. However I personally would not drop
> SDL1 support as this allows to compile Hatari for legacy systems which
> do not get an SDL2 port.

SDL1 support will certainly stay for a while (let's say the next two
to five years), but also not forever, since at one point in time, it's a
pain to maintain old code that hardly anybody uses anymore.
Speaking of this, I plan to remove for example at least some of the
8-bit host screen rendering routines after the next release - I doubt
that anybody is still using 256 color displays today (if not, please
speak up).

 Thomas