Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

macintoshgarden.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#41

Post by pixelpoet »

cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

This is so hilarious for me, for whom SDL is truly legendary (literally decades of often daily use), and who constantly gets downvoted into a smoking hole in a ground for expressing the same sentiment about every random 7 week old JS framework or Grafana monitoring extension or whatever... the militant webdev bias on HN is super clear.

The recently released SDL3 is hot shit today, BTW: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/FrontPage

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#42

Post by cortesoft »

cardanome wrote: post #29
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

What exactly is your background? MY first idea was that you might be very young but your account is from 2010. Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is. I am curious how you managed to avoid learning about SDL despite being on hacker news.

I don't know what to say other than I am pretty sure I have never encountered it before. I have been coding for over 30 years, 20 years professionally, and have never seen it. You can see by my account age and comment history that I have been active on HN for 15 years.

I actually have interest in game programming, too. So I don't know.

I am sure I'll encounter it 10 times this week now, good old Baeder-Meinhoff

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#43

Post by cortesoft »

haunter wrote: post #19
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

>Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? No but it's assumed that if use a site like HN you can figure it out?

Fair, and I did, after I commented. Not exactly sure why I felt so compelled to comment, maybe because I was frustrated trying to find on the linked page what it was talking about.

I thought it was an actual game for a good chunk of time.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#44

Post by cortesoft »

skyyler wrote: post #14
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

It is one of the most popular multimedia libraries in the world. If you want to build a game without using an engine, but don't want to deal with talking to the hardware on your own, SDL is there.

Thanks

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#45

Post by cortesoft »

bowsamic wrote: post #23
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

Yes, it is one of those things that I’d expect your average HN user to know about

This feels like an example of the XKCD comic "lucky 10000"... I guess it was just my turn to learn about it today, after 15 years actively on HN.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#46

Post by bigstrat2003 »

cardanome wrote: post #29
cortesoft wrote: post #12

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

What exactly is your background? MY first idea was that you might be very young but your account is from 2010. Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is. I am curious how you managed to avoid learning about SDL despite being on hacker news.

> Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is.

I've literally never even heard the term SDL before this. I would say that it's nowhere near the same class of ubiquity as the other two examples you gave.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#47

Post by classichasclass »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #27

Wondering what I could do with it ... I rewrote Glypha (an old Mac shareware game I wrote) using modern SDL2. Might be fun to try to "back port" (?) it to OS 9 on top of SDL2 (rather than the clunkier CopyBits() calls I used in the original shareware game).

The funny part is I think the SDL2 porter implemented most of the software rendering with ... CopyBits!

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#48

Post by contrahax »

helfire wrote: post #6

It's really a great time to be a classic MacOS developer - tons of resources out there such as Retro68k, AmendHub, and a small but active community of people interested in sharing examples and help. Back in the day when this stuff was modern I didn't have many resources or people to talk to about it, so exploring what could have been is an interesting endeavor. https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 https://amendhub.com/

Retro68 is indeed very cool, I started writing some Think C and it is fun to code on such a tiny screen but Retro68 allowing you to code on your regular dev environment using more modern C has been great. I've been playing around with it last week to make some applications (not a plug because these projects suck!) - If anyone wants a simple Retro68 application boilerplate to start off with:

- Chatbot: https://github.com/yocontra/macintosh-ai/

- Game: https://github.com/yocontra/maccraft (Doesn't work very well atm, making a game run well on a macintosh plus is hard!)

I wasn't even alive when these computers were out but enjoying coding for them - something to be said about the simple interfaces (both in C and UI) and challenge of making things work with the constraints of the hardware.

Retro68 community has some really neat stuff like MacHTTP (https://github.com/antscode/MacHTTP) as well so you can offload some work to services (assuming you buy one of the many SCSI Wifi thingys).

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#49

Post by grishka »

skrrtww wrote: post #35

Pretty cool! I have heard stories of people in 2025 creating a fat macOS binary containing arm64, x86_64, x86, and ppc slices. I hope that we can get virtualization of x86_64 macOS on arm64 hosts. It would be really cool to be able to do such a thing solely on a modern machine!

You can't virtualize a different architecture. Virtualization means that the guest OS runs natively on the host CPU with some sort of hypervisor. Do you mean emulation?

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#50

Post by cardanome »

cortesoft wrote: post #42
cardanome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is your background? MY first idea was that you might be very young but your account is from 2010. Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is. I am curious how you managed to avoid learning about SDL despite being on hacker news.

I don't know what to say other than I am pretty sure I have never encountered it before. I have been coding for over 30 years, 20 years professionally, and have never seen it. You can see by my account age and comment history that I have been active on HN for 15 years. I actually have interest in game programming, too. So I don't know. I am sure I'll encounter it 10 times this week now, good old Baeder-Meinhoff

Oh you absolutely will. I guarantee you, you have used a lot of software that is using SDL.

https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/SDL/

Though to be fair it kind of makes sense that you would have never used SDL yourself. It you never go that far down the stack and do stuff like write your own game engine and the like, you wouldn't really need to know it. I guess I am more aware of software dependencies as a Linux user? That is my only explanation or maybe you are really just one of those lucky 10000.

Post reply on HN