This is pretty fun! Game porter Ryan "Icculus" Gordon has announced that they've picked back up an older project called sdl12-compat, which provides SDL2 compatibility for older software stuck on SDL1.2.

Recently I started back up on an ancient project I never got too far with before, called sdl12-compat. The idea is to provide a binary that looks like SDL 1.2 to the legacy app, but behind the scenes, it loads a real build of SDL2 and lets that do all the hard work, just translating between what the app and SDL2 need.

There's plenty more to the post but that above seemed like a good intro…

An interesting project, one that could take some pain away from old games and applications that are no longer supported or updated. As Gordon notes, it would enable things like Wayland support without an X11 fallback, support other platforms due to the zlib license and so on. One bit that does sound quite exciting, is that it would get older games and applications that were software-rendered over onto the GPU and getting better performance, as well as better fullscreen support and more.

Love the Half-Life 3 folder there, blink and you will miss it.

While the use of it will obviously be quite limited, since most things are made with SDL2 now and you would be mad to use SDL1.2 it's still great to have projects like this so nothing is left behind.

See the full post on Patreon.