[SDL] Writing directly on screen

[Carlo Capocasa]

Thanks! Much appreciated.

> If you mean as a way to just display text over, say, a viewed webpage,
> then not really.

So in other words, there is no way to use SDL to directly manipulate
video memory in a cross-platform way. Or make the main SDL window
partially translucent. (1-bit alpha would be sufficient).

> SDL is intended to work as an executable, independant program (is this
> making any sense?!) either as a Windows app or under some flavour of Linux.

Yeah. I want to run the app as a daemon/service.

> I guess you could grab the current screen data (somehow) and then
> overlay your text on it, under SDL, using a full-screen mode, and should
> the user move the mouse (for instance) then the SDL app would exit.
> Possible but quite tricky.

Yeah... I have a hunch that's too much overhead for the quick
flashing I have in mind (exiting would actually be done by timer,
e.g. after 0.02 seconds).

Need to give this some more thought... Maybe just low-level
programming this for all three platforms would work better.

Thanks for your input!

Carlo