I'm not an expert in this but what i understand from the sdl mailinglist is that there is an issue about SDL_Flip in win2k and winxp. It seems that the horizontal syncs on the screen image are handled differently by these win versions. SDL_Flip will do the hardware blitting if you request a HW surface. If you don't or are in window mode SDL_Flip is replaced by SDL_Rect, which does not have the flikkering....
So the three possible solutions are: do software blitting, run it on win98 or winme, or hope that they fix this bug in the next version of sdl....

The weird thing is that i never noticed the flikkering untill recently (i usually do stuff in windowed mode). I cannot remember that i saw the flikkering the first time i tried one of these cone lessons. So it can also be an other problem. When i updated to DX8 i did not update my driver of my graphic card. Since then i sometimes have problems with other apps as well. So it can also be a problem like this. I'll try updating the cards driver soon....

[edited by - smilydon on July 29, 2002 9:08:16 PM]

You are right, i also see flickering in win98 (i have dual boot). Also my driver under win98 was up to date.

However i could stop it by changing the 32 in SDL_SetVideoMode to 24. It is possible that the older cards (mine is also very old (1998)) have trouble with the alpha channel. I can remember that i once ran a program that checked the sdl features i could do. It told me that i do not have hardware accelerated alpha blitting. That's basically what you have when you ask for a 32 bit dept (one byte for RGBA).

I still think it should not create a 32 bit video mode when it cannot handle this in hardware. So this might be a bug....

However, i have not checked whether i got a hardware surface, maybe sdl gave me a software buffer because it didn't like the 24 bit depth. This i have to check.....

[edited by - smilydon on July 30, 2002 5:25:14 PM]