Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) sdl2-compat

https://www.libsdl.org/

This is the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a general API that provides low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D framebuffer across multiple platforms.

This code is a compatibility layer; it provides a binary and source compatible API for programs written against SDL2, but it uses SDL3 behind the scenes. If you are writing new code, please target SDL3 directly and do not use this layer.

If you absolutely must have the real SDL2 ("SDL 2 Classic"), please use the SDL2 branch at https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL, which occasionally gets bug fixes (and eventually, no new formal releases). But we strongly encourage you not to do that.

How to use:

Build the library. This will need access to SDL3's headers, CMake and the build tools of your choice. Once built, you will have a drop-in replacement that can be used with any existing binary that relies on SDL2. You can copy this library over the existing SDL2 build, or force it to take priority over a system copy with LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc. At runtime, sdl2-compat needs to be able to find a copy of SDL3, so plan to include it with the library if necessary.
If you want to build an SDL2 program from source code, we have included compatibility headers, so that sdl2-compat can completely replace SDL2 at all points. Note that sdl2-compat itself does not use these headers, so if you just want the library, you don't need them.

Building the library:

These are quick-start instructions; there isn't anything out of the ordinary here if you're used to using CMake.

You'll need to use CMake to build sdl2-compat. Download at cmake.org or install from your package manager (sudo apt-get install cmake on Ubuntu, etc).

Please refer to the CMake documentation for complete details, as platform and build tool details vary.

You'll need a copy of SDL3 to build sdl2-compat, because we need the SDL3 headers. You can build this from source or install from a package manager. Windows and Mac users can download prebuilt binaries from SDL's download page; make sure you get the "development libraries" and not "runtime binaries" there.

Linux users might need some packages from their Linux distribution. On Ubuntu, you might need to do (!!! FIXME: this won't work until SDL3 is further in development!) ...

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libsdl3-dev libgl-dev

Now just point CMake at sdl2-compat's directory. Here's a command-line example:

cd sdl2-compat
cmake -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .
cmake --build build

On Windows or macOS, you might prefer to use CMake's GUI, but it's the same idea: give it the directory where sdl2-compat is located, click "Configure," choose your favorite compiler, then click "Generate." Now you have project files! Click "Open Project" to launch your development environment. Then you can build however you like with Visual Studio, Xcode, etc.

If necessary, you might have to fill in the location of the SDL3 headers when using CMake. sdl2-compat does not need SDL3's library to build, just its headers (although it may complain about the missing library, you can ignore that). From the command line, add -DSDL3_INCLUDE_DIRS=/path/to/SDL3/include, or find this in the CMake GUI and set it appropriately, click "Configure" again, and then "Generate."

When the build is complete, you'll have a shared library you can drop in as a replacement for an existing SDL2 build. This will also build the original SDL2 test apps, so you can verify the library is working.

Building for older CPU architectures on Linux:

There are a lot of binaries from many years ago that used SDL2, which is to say they are for CPU architectures that are likely not your current system's.

If you want to build a 32-bit x86 library on an x86-64 Linux machine, for compatibility with older games, you should install some basic 32-bit development libraries for your distribution. On Ubuntu, this would be:

(!!! FIXME: this won't work until SDL3 is further in development!)

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libsdl3-dev:i386

...and then add -m32 to your build options:

cd sdl2-compat
cmake -Bbuild32 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-m32
cmake --build build32

Building for older CPU architectures on macOS:

macOS users can try adding -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='arm64;x86_64' instead of -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-m32 to make a Universal Binary for both 64-bit Intel and Apple Silicon machines.

Building for older CPU architectures on Windows:

Windows users just select a 32-bit version of Visual Studio when running CMake, when it asks you what compiler to target in the CMake GUI.

Configuration options:

sdl2-compat has a number of configuration options which can be used to work around issues with individual applications, or to better fit your system or preferences.

These options are all specified as environment variables, and can be set by running your application with them set on the command-line, for example:

SDL2COMPAT_DEBUG_LOGGING=1 SDL2COMPAT_ALLOW_SYSWM=0 %command%

will run %command% with high-dpi monitor support enabled, but OpenGL scaling support disabled.

(While these environment variables are checked at various times throughout the lifetime of the app, sdl2-compat expects these to be set before the process starts and not change during the life of the process, and any places where changing it later might affect operation is purely accidental and might change. That is to say: don't write an SDL2-based app with plans to tweak these values on the fly!)

The available options are:

SDL2COMPAT_DEBUG_LOGGING: (checked at startup) If enabled, print debugging messages to stderr. These messages are mostly useful to developers, or when trying to track down a specific bug.
SDL2COMPAT_ALLOW_SYSWM: (checked during SDL_Init) Enabled by default. If disabled, SDL_SYSWMEVENT events will not be delivered to the app, and SDL_GetWMInfo() will fail; this is useful if you have a program that tries to access X11 directly through SDL's interfaces, but can survive without it, becoming compatible with, for example, Wayland, or perhaps just avoiding a bug in target-specific code.

Compatibility issues with applications directly accessing underlying APIs

Some applications combine the use of SDL with direct access to the underlying OS or window system. When running these applications on the same OS and SDL video driver (e.g. a program written for X11 on Linux is run on X11 on Linux), sdl2-compat is usually compatible.

However, if you wish to run an application on a different video driver, the application will be unable to access the underlying API it is expecting, and may fail. This often occurs trying to run applications written for X11 under Wayland, and particularly affects a number of popular OpenGL extension loaders.

In this case, the best workaround is to run under a compatibility layer like XWayland, and set the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable to the driver the program is expecting:

SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11

Please report this to the game developer as a bug. Game developers who know that their game engine requires X11 on Linux can arrange for this to happen by including code similar to this at the beginning of main():

#ifdef SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER_X11
SDL_SetHintWithPriority(SDL_HINT_VIDEODRIVER, "x11", SDL_HINT_OVERRIDE);
#endif

This is backward-compatible with "classic" SDL 2 version 2.0.12 or later. If older versions need to be supported, set the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable instead.

For unmaintained games where applying this code change is not feasible, either a wrapper script can set the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable, or the game can be added to the quirks array in sdl2-compat.

License

libsdl-org/sdl2-compat

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