SDL performance too slow to be normal

[soundaxis]

I've recently started porting some of my SDL games to the dreamcast among other platforms however my current game is going horribly slow something that should take 1 second is taking about 13. Any ideas?

[Darksaviour69]

I heard the are a good few problems with the DC sdl port (memory leak? ), but i'm no expert.

[BlueCrab]

The Dreamcast version of SDL is pretty much rubbish. Any serious development for the Dreamcast should avoid it, pretty much at all costs. If you're serious about doing Dreamcast development, its actually very easy to use KallistiOS directly for most things, and you'll generally end up with a much better result.

One thing to realize though is that the Dreamcast is nowhere near as powerful as any other machines that you're likely testing it against. Something that takes 1 second on a decently specced PC (something at least 2GHz) could very well take 13 seconds on the Dreamcast (which is only 200MHz). Anything compute-intensive will take a lot longer to do on the DC than a decent PC.

[soundaxis]

Well the games when I had wrote them I made sure that they where light on resources (8MB ram usage tops). The main issue I am having seems to be redrawing stuff on the screen. I guess I could just use KOS instead of SDL though, but are there anyways I can make things run faster?

[BlueCrab]

There are other supposably faster versions of SDL out there for the Dreamcast, but in my experience, they're less stable and more prone to crashing.

Its easier to rewrite stuff than to try to work around the bugs.

[soundaxis]

I see, well thanks for the help.

[Indiket]

BlueCrab is right, using KOS directly is a lot faster than SDL.

If you wanna do a test, you can try Chui's implementation of SDL and prey to obtain a good speed :D

[soundaxis]

I've been using chui's the whole time. But either way I'm just gonna use kos instead less of a hassle.