Games - Simple DirectMedia Layer

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	Games - Simple DirectMedia Layer

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, QNX, IRIX, and a few other unofficially ported platforms. It manages video, events, numeric audio, CD-ROM sound, threads, and timers.

Sam Lantinga created the library, first releasing it in early 1998, while working for Loki Software. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port Doom to BeOS (see Doom source ports). Several other free libraries appeared to work with SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL.

The SDL is mainly coded in C but has bindings to many languages and exists on several operating systems.

SDL itself is very simple; it merely acts as a thin, cross-platform wrapper, providing support for 2D pixel operations, sound, file access, event handling, timing, threading, and more. OpenGL is often used with SDL to provide fast 3D rendering. It is often thought of as a cross-platform DirectX, although it lacks some if its more advanced functionality. SDL instead has a huge number of third party extensions that make it easy to do more advanced functions.

It is freely available open source and is licensed under the LGPL.

Bindings

Ada
Basic (sdlBasic)
C#
D ()
Eiffel
Erlang
Euphoria
Guile
Java
Lisp
Lua
ML
Objective C
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Pike
Pliant
Python (pygame)
Ruby

Extensions

Widget Sets: Guichan and ParaGUI

Various games using SDL

Abuse-SDL
Aleph One
icculus.org/AvP
Anvil of Thyrion
Battle for Wesnoth
Bug Squish
BZFlag
Cannon Smash
Chromium B.S.U.
Circus Linux!
Creatures Docking Station
Cube
Daimonin
Client
D1X
Descent_II_D2X
Defendguin
Dominions
Eat the Whistle GPL'ed version
Entombed!
Exult
Freeciv
FreeCNC
Freelords
Frozen Bubble
GearHead
Gem Drop X
gltron
Heretic
Homeworld SDL
Hopkins FBI
Inherit the Earth
rerelease only
Kobo Deluxe
Krilo
LBreakout
Lentilwars
Mutant Storm
netPanzer GPL'ed version
Neverwinter Nights
OpenTTD
Pontifex II
pydance
rRootage
The Ur-Quan Masters
Stepmania
Super Tux
Tile World
Tux, of Math Command
Tux Paint
Vectoroids

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Simple DirectMedia Layer ]

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