Using Win10, Cygwin, GCC 7, SDL 2.0.7 (as provided by Cygwin)
Trying to get the dead simplest Hello program to work (from http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/01_hello_SDL/index2.php) but it does not go. On startup I get this enigmatic error from SDL_Init: “No available video device”.
For fun I also tried a previous Hello for SDL 1.2 and got similar results, so it’s not specific to v2.
I did grab a copy of the 2.0.9 source to try, but couldn’t get past the configure script. My gcc doesn’t make Win32 binaries it seems.
I might be missing something obvious, I’m still very much an SDL noob. Googling the error brings up a lot about Linux and X but no help for Windows.
Following up myself here.
The short answer I found is that Cygwin’s SDL build is somehow broken and I don’t know why. My attempted build of 2.0.9 was faulty and worked better with a freshly unpacked source tree.
I got a clean build of libsdl2.a, but I also got a libsdl2.dll.a. My Hello builds and links now, but fails to run when sdl2.dll is not found. That seems odd for a Unixy thing, but it’s Windows so <shrug>. I found several (dozen) instances of sdl2.dll on my system attached to misc. apps, and eventually found one that works. That was a 32- vs 64-bit thing.
Next I fired up VS17 and coaxed it into building me a fresh copy of sdl2.dll that also worked with my Hello. That’s a big box checked off, now I can rummage around in there and break things to my liking.
I do miss the simplicity of just writing bytes into a frame buffer (1993 called, wants its MS-DOS back). I know SDL is very powerful and -relatively- simple, but I sort of feel like an old prospector looking at the ten-lane superhighway that stands where his old mule trail used to be…very shiny but a lot more complicated. But I think I can see the way forward from here.
Does it work if you build with whatever cygwin provides but make the application use the SDL2.dll from the official runtime binary download (https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php)?
(I think it should, but I don’t know if cygwin does anything weird that breaks the ABI)
I’m not sure I can answer that, but here’s what I saw. Using the Cygwin build, my Hello got the title error string via SDL_GetError(), so an SDL library of some kind was in play, but I don’t think that it was sdl2.dll. Cygwin does put a cygSDL2-2-0-0.dll into /bin though.
Next I uninstalled the Cygwin build of SDL2 and ran a regular conf/make/install on the SDL2 sources with plain gcc 7.4. This time my Hello failed with a Windows popup indicating sdl2.dll was not found. After I found it and copied it to my path, that same Hello then worked without rebuilding. I think this suggests that Cygwin’s SDL DLL isn’t built quite right.
After I found the random sdl2.dll that let my Hello run correctly, I did download the official sdl2.dll and found it to be identical to the one I found, so to that point I can say yes.