[SDL] Changing from Full screen to Windows and back (was Re: [SDL] Re: SDL_FULLSCREEN memory leakage)

[Loren Osborn]

On Wed, 2002-10-16 at 11:50, pvwr at sympatico.ca wrote:
> > There is support for hardware surfaces with DGA (which I think is a bad
> > idea -- root access: blah, blah, blah), and with fbcon (which I rather
> > like)...
> 
>    Excuse me for being ignorant, but what is DGA and fbcon?

SDL has several backends on each platform.  For instance, under Win32 it
supports both DirectX and DIB interfaces. In Linux, X is just one of
many interfaces that it supports.  DGA is an extention to X that allows
processes with 'root' permission to directly access the video card
(somehow still through the X protocol, but I don't know too many details
on this)... fbcon (or "Frame Buffer Console") is a kernel option that
emulates text mode on a graphics framebuffer.  fbcon is optional on x86
and standard on non-x86 Linux. If your kernel supports fbcon, you
probably see a graphical Tux at the begining of your system booting
Linux.  It can display graphics on the emulated text mode when told to
do so.  The nice thing about fbcon with respect to SDL is it requires
neither X nor root access.  There are also other backends availible
under Linux: svgalib allows you to control the video card from a
terminal, but requires root access.  GGI is availible although it's
vastly less popular than it used to be.  AAlib allows you to run SDL in
"ascii-art" mode. (I'm sure there are a few more... just can't think of
them right now.)

Hope that helps,

-Loren