How many of you remember Loki Games/Entertaiment/Software? Hands up  now! I’m still waiting.. wuhuu hands up now! Loki.. Loki! Oh still no hands.. what a pity (Damn how old Am I?). Ok I Admit! It was before Steam, before Internet was this huge fast beast for watching videos, telling how you are doing right now and sharing photos.

Loki only shipped CD’s for installing your application and there wasn’t hot fixes waiting when you got CD from post or yes there where but I had to wait and wait for 200 MB blob to download for ages with my 57600 modem. All the time I thought that I’ll boot Windows for playing Castle Wolfestein. It was long before before Linux have any gaming community what so ever. There weren’t Firefox or Chrome available and Google was just starting to own our lifes.  So it was dark days of late ’90 (we had electricity thanks for asking).

Loki was founded on 1998 and  it got on bankruptcy on 2001 after IT bubble blowed. Loki changed Linux in good way. One thing that they left behind was called Simple Direct Layer (SDL1). SDL layer sits top on Xorg that makes creating games more ease. You can port your game to Windows and Mac OS X with little effort. Current version of SDL is SDL2.

Good thing about SDL is that it abstracts drawing to screen in Windows, Mac OS X and X-windows. SDL1 was all about pixel buffers but SDL2 is all about surfaces and acceleration. It support many more OSes but that’s not the what we are looking at today. So how do you playing audio out of SDL1/2?. Good thing is audio interface stayed same through conversion from SDL1 to SDL2. They only added few bugs and float point audio in SDL2.  SDL1 have recording but I didn’t manage to make it work so if anyone with more patience than me can lead me to correct path I would be happy puppy. Here is SDL Github location: https://github.com/illuusio/linux-audio-example/tree/master/sdl (more…)