Good idea. Also, I did a search and found 20 threads that mention "windib".

From searching those threads so far....

It's the craptacular S3/ATI Rage series! You win S3/ATI!:

S3 Savage 4
ATI Rage series of graphics cards

Since DosBox is set to Surface as default, it's odd that Dosbox has to use WinDib for these chipsets.. I'd understand if DosBox was set to Overlay,OGL,Direct3D....but surface? WTF.

Anyone with these chipsets know if the latest drivers fix this SDL issue? If so then it's be an easy "fix" to add to the DosBox readme for people to upgrade to the latest drivers for those chipsets. Since these video cards are so old we would probably should specify working driver versions....this is assuming that an updated driver fixes the issue.

If you set you desktop to 256 colors, you can only use "windib", or else DOSBox won't start at all. If your desktop is set to 16 colors, not even "windib" will work.

DosFreak wrote:

Since DosBox is set to Surface as default, it's odd that Dosbox has to use WinDib for these chipsets.. I'd understand if DosBox was set to Overlay,OGL,Direct3D....but surface? WTF.

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=windib only has an effect with surface, nowhere else (because SDL video is (mostly) bypassed in all other modes). It's just that dosbox comes with a custom build of SDL.DLL that has DirectX surfaces enabled, while a default build has not (guess why...). Another fix would be to provide a non-DirectX-enabled SDL.DLL, it would always use windib.

Hmm, so SDL supports neither DirectX hardware accelerated 2D surfaces nor hardware overlay out of the box? I'm not too impressed with this aspect SDL's graphics capabilities in the context of modern 2D game applications. I can't fault them for it though, as I'm sure their main goal was maximum compatability across a maximum number of platforms.

I suppose the Windib enabled SDL could be included by default instead of the way it is now. Any downsides to doing this?

I suppose using WinDib is slower but, if SDL is not using WinDib nor DirectX hardware accelerated 2D surfaces nor hardware overlay (as stated by HunterZ), what the hell is using?

PS - By the way, I am getting this nasty error message on my ATi card while using both SDL 1.2.8.0 and 1.2.9.0 - What gives?

DosFreak: It's a tradeoff between compatability and performance. By using DirectDraw for surface mode, Qbix (and I agree with him) is probably gambling that people with systems hefty enough to run DOSBox will have fairly modern video cards with decent DirectX support running at 16- or 32-bit color. The hope is probably that DirectX will then take advantage of 2D hardware-acceleration features of the card and thus improve rendering speed.

el_pusher: SDL can be configured (hacked, actually, as it involves enabling disabled code) to use DirectX/DirectDraw for 2D surfaces, as Qbix does for DOSBox releases. According to Moe, If you don't do this it will apparently use "windib" mode instead.

HunterZ: Thanks for the clarification. 😎

PS - It seems I overwrote SDL.DLL - After reinstalling DOSBox everything is working fine. Thanks.

HunterZ wrote:

Hmm, so SDL supports neither DirectX hardware accelerated 2D surfaces nor hardware overlay out of the box? I'm not too impressed with this aspect SDL's graphics capabilities in the context of modern 2D game applications. I can't fault them for it though, as I'm sure their main goal was maximum compatability across a maximum number of platforms.

Well, I was ignoring YUV overlays for the moment. Those are unrelated to windib/directx as well. That functionality is related to full-motion video, thus different APIs are used.
And saying "no DX support out-of-the-box" isn't entirely fair: the code is present, it just has issues (as we can see).

Yeah, sorry for throwing the overlay thing into the mix. It's a bit off-topic, but I couldn't help mentioning it as a related annoyance. It pretty much makes "overlay" output mode in DOSBox useless from what I can tell. I wish I knew how to rectify it.

Even if the code is in there, it's disabled by default. By "out-of-the-box" I meant a clean compile of CVS or release code without source hacks, which is probably how they compile the release version DLLs on libsdl.org.

I coded a working fix for it.

Anyone willing to test it ? (you need to have to specify the windib parameter in 0.63)

I tested it with one person. But her video display messed up 🙁 It turned out that happened with the regular windib interface as well.

I have to use it because my Win32 box is headless... no keyboard or mouse (it's the mouse that gets you).

1. Windows 7 (6.1.7601)
2. DosBox 0.74
3. Intel HD 3000
4. BIOS 2089.11, Driver Version 9.17.10.4229

My reason for using windib is not graphics, but keyboard. When I run without windib, my backslash and right shift keys don't work, and a couple of others are in the wrong place (aquare brackets, for one). I have a US keyboard (tenkeyless cooler master CMStorm).