The following table is extracted directly from the original news page of the old FreePascal-meets-SDL.net website, which shows the news from 20th July of 2005 to 19th July of 2014.
The table had two colons, the left one showing the date, the right one the news text. Have fun browsing through the old news.
| 19th July 2014 | Chapter 7 is finished and released today. It explains how to generate text with SDL2_ttf.
|
|---|---|
| 5th April 2014 | The new SDL2 chapter 6 has been released. It treats further very important texture manipulation functions, e.g. rotation, scaling and colour manipulations, and also describes some functions to set a viewport and the “logical size resolution”.
|
| 19th January 2014 | Yeah, new year, new chapters! They treat the brand new SDL2. With this update the first five chapters treating SDL2 are released. They introduce to SDL2 and cover many basic and new concepts. For example the concept of textures (in contrast to surfaces) is explained, displaying images, drawing primitives and much more. Expect more chapters to come. The old chapters treating SDL 1.2 are still available for those who are still interested in them.
|
| 16th November 2013 | I didn’t have much time to care too much about this site lately. Anyway, on 12th August 2013 finally SDL2 (short for SDL 2.0) has been released! This is excellent news since with SDL2 a lot of improvements and new features are introduced to SDL. Check out the SDL2 MigrationGuide to see which new features are introduced and what you need to know about SDL2. And there are some Pascal units available already, check these out here (pure units), here (pure units, different project) and here (units incorporated in a game library called Bare Game Library). As soon as possible I will also start to update my tutorials to the use of the new units, probably archiving the old tutorial pages treating SDL 1.2 and just start from scratch for the new pages treating SDL 2.0. Thanks to Cybermonkey for the hint in the forum! 🙂
|
| 10th March 2012 | A new chapter 8a is now released. It explains how to convert a SDL image to an OGL texture. Before writing this chapter I thought about extending chapter 8 but then I felt it might be too many new information, especially if someone’s new to SDL AND OpenGL. Also made several minor changes to the website, e.g. every page got the doctype line for better browser compatibility.
|
| 3rd July 2011 | I’m very happy to announce that more than 10,000 visitors hit my site by now! Eventually this hobby project can be counted as success. Thanks to all visitors, readers and especially participants who mentioned bugs and ideas in the forum! Last but not least to mention the fruitful partnership with the Pascal Game Development project and their magazine! Thanks to Jason and his team!Since FPC ships SDL with pre-compiled units since a while I decided to remove the path setting steps in several chapters (3a, 5, 7, 8). They may confuse readers. Furthermore they are quite specific for the FP IDE, I doubt many people really use this nowadays for serious development. Otherwise beginners who might still use the FP IDE or a different IDE should get the idea when seeing how to set the unit paths in FP IDE. Therefore, for people who install the units manually I added these information at the end of the first chapter with a little explanation. I added a FAQ page for frequently asked questions, mainly from the forum. The first question added concerns the 64 bit compatibility of SDL (thanks to Cybermonkey for a a lot of contributions to solve this).
|
| 2nd January 2011 | New chapter 4a created dealing with SDL_GFX which is a valuable extension of SDL. It is demonstrated how to compile your own SDL_gfx.dll, how images are zoomed and rotated, a framerate manager is introduced and primitives are drawn. The author’s page is added to the link list.In 2005, when starting this page, one of the two main purposes was to show how to install/configure your Windows machine to work with Free Pascal and SDL, nowadays FPC is shared with JEDI-SDL implemented as an auto-installer, also JEDI-SDL itself is installed by an auto-installer. So actually a manual installation isn’t necessary anymore for recent versions of these software packages. For archiving reasons I will keep chapter 1 as is but it is kind of obsolete. I did minor changes to chapter 1 and 1a.
|
| 7th November 2010 | Recently issue #3 of the Pascal Gamer Magazine has been released. Please check this great stuff out!
|
| 22nd October 2010 | Two important news this time. Firstly, chapter 6 ist now completely updated. From now on ALL chapters show the complete source code of the example programs completely first and are then treating the source step by step. Secondly, PascalGameDevelopment.com and the Pascal Gamer Magazine are from now on official partner sites of Free Pascal meets SDL. If you’re interested in Pascal game development you should really check out these sites. Especially the forum of PascalGameDevelopment.com is a rich resource for programmers. There are currently two issues published of the Pascal Gamer Magazine which are available online for free, so don’t hesitate to give this high quality magazine a try.
|
| 11th September 2010 | Just a small counter (page views) update. This was requested by the counter provider.
|
| 8th August 2010 | Updated chapter 5 completely.
|
| 9th June 2010 | Updated chapter 4 completely.
|
| 1st November 2009 | Updated chapter 2 and 3. Explanation of variable type UInt32 shifted from chapter 3 to 2. I decided to give the exact definition for any function provided in my tutorial according to the corresponding source code. So instead of general arguments like “components” or “parameters”, the exact parameter list and their variable types are shown.
|
| 27th September 2009 | Took me longer than expected, but added now the new chapter 8 describing how to prepare Free Pascal and SDL for OpenGL programming. Thanks to Roin who mentioned a now fixed major bug which let the source code snippets appear centered instead of left aligned in many browsers (Epiphany, Firefox, IE). Changes in main page. Reworked chapter 3. Moved information about SDL_DELAY function from chapter 4 to chapter 3. Added a result box at the end of any chapter describing what the program is going to do if working correctly.
|
| 8th July 2009 | Along with the new URL www.FreePascal-meets-SDL.net, a whole bunch of updates come up. I reworked and shortened chapter 1 now giving some information about the recently provided JEDI-SDL units of FPC since version 2.2.2. Renamed chapter 1b to 1a. More details on SDL_DELAY function in chapter 4. Reworked the table of chapter 5. Added new chapter 3a describing the usage of different image format (e.g. JPG, PNG, GIF…). I’m working and planning to release two new chapters in the next time, so stay tuned. Please don’t forget to update your links or bookmarks to the new URL.
|
| 13th July 2008 | Reader Robvdl mentioned that Firefox users aren’t able to view many images and to download some files. I fixed this now. Thanks Robvdl. I also added a new subforum now for questions related to programming.
|
| 26th April 2008 | New chapter 7 added! Now you learn how to introduce music and sound to your programs. I reworked chapter 3 and now explain not only how to display a picture but how to blit parts of pictures which is a quite important feature at all. Updated chapter 1 and link section a little.
|
| 13th January 2008 | Happy new year! I reworked the first chapter because the JEDI-SDL project now provides an auto-installer. The new chapter 1b describes the installation and configuration of Lazarus. This surely isn’t directly related to SDL but the combination of SDL and Lazarus yields a quite powerful development kit. The links are updated and I started adding copyright information.
|
| 7th October 2007 | Read in a pascal development forum that someone had problems getting my tutorials to run because he didn’t know about CRT unit which I used habbitually in any chapter. When I thought about it, it seemed really avoidable in most cases so I reworked all chapters and removed it if possible.
|
| 26th July 2007 | Reworked chapter 6 for JEDI-SDL and added mouse handling.
|
| 15th June 2007 | Reworked chapter 5 for JEDI-SDL.
|
| 6th May 2007 | Reworked chapter 4 for JEDI-SDL.
|
| 4th May 2007 | Major changes have been applied to this site. Since the SDL4FP project seems to be dead I will now rewrite all tutorials for JEDI-SDL project. This project is alive and in development and has much more translated headers. The first three chapters are finished and can be accessed by the menu. The old chapters for SDL4FP are available, too but you should really think about switching to JEDI-SDL.
|
| 3rd April 2006 | Added first part of chapter 6, which describes event handling. Furthermore I updated some chapters, added some links and a brand new tables page which contain two useful tables. I will add new tables if I think they could be useful.
|
| 15th October 2005 | Added new chapter, added links and download area.
|
| 22nd July 2005 | Made some updates to the site and added a new chapter. |
| 20th July 2005 | Today page got online with first three chapters describing how to configure a windows system to use Free Pascal and SDL library. Furthermore there is a forum to keep contact if needed. |