[SDL] RLE Compression

[Rudolf Janz]

Hi,

I have implemented RLE compression for per-pixel alpha surfaces (could be adapted for color key as well). The new implementation compresses horizontal lines of the same color (translucent and opaque). It does this using signed run length (negative means repeat next color). The current RLE acceleration only removes transparent pixels and groups opaque/translucent pixels for faster blitting.

So how much memory does it save? Of course that depends on the content.
On the application I am using it for, a GUI with a lot of translucency and in general large amounts of same color areas (e.g. text with large font sizes), it is a major win (savings of 50-90%).
In the worst case e.g. dithered images, there is no gain and potentially minimal loss (opaque runs in 16 bit color are now limited to 127 pixels instead of 255)

I did not do any performance measurements, but there should be not much difference, there are a little bit more conditions in the blitting involved, on the other hand less memory is touched.

Additionally this implementation uses a two pass RLE conversion. First the size of the resulting RLE compressed data is computed (by running the same algorithm on a dummy buffer).
THen the surface is actually compressed into a memory block of the right size. The RLE implementation in the current SDL allocates a worst case buffer (which in most cases is much too large) and reallocs that at the end, after the size is known. At least on Windows CE with the limited Virtual Memory (max. 32 MB, around 24 M usable) that leads to serious memory fragmentation.

On a normal PC memory is normally not much of a problem. But on a memory limited device like the NDS this might be useful.

I have attached a diff (against SDL 1.2.13), this is not meant to be final (especially the UnRLE code is not well tested). If somebody is interested I might clean it up and test it little bit more. 

One problem that I have is, that with the current API (I was using 1.2.13, but I saw no changes in 1.3) it is not possible to directly RLE  compress the surface without creating a new surface and thereby allocating a large block of memory (DisplayFormatAlpha/ConvertSurface), as a workaround I used the internal function MapSurface to do this. Is there a better way?

  Rudolf

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