[SDL] background / palette tricks

[neil at cloudsprinter.com]

i am getting on with my puzzle game.. its all going swimmingly \o/

only thing is there is alot of background, area of the screen that remain static
and are not involved in gameplay at all.. at first i just had a grid sheet of
128x128 texture scrolling across the background, it looked ok, but wasnt
condusive ( sp? word? ) to keeping the plotting slick and made the whole thing
a bit clunky ( there is alot of on the fly surface creation going on for stuff
no-one will probably ever notice ).

So anyway, i am looking for input on creating nice fast to draw background
effects, perhaps a pallete changing surface, or somekind drawn fractal, but i'm
not sure what is going to
      a) look good, not like some cheap effect
      b) not take an age to render

any input please, if you ( as usual ) have any idea what i am trying to get
across ;)

i guess i could just go proccesor meltdown effects ( rubbish effect my bad
programming ) and have all the options to switch of all the effects and just
have basic graphics..... but i still want a nice looking moving background of
somekind... that isnt rubbish..