ok so far im gathering that for big tasks its good to use Open GL for blitting because SDL is slower. Is there a way to use open gl blitting without a whole ton of over head. or is there a way to get the same support that open gl dose in terms of hardware? thanks[smile]

If by OpenGL blitting you mean using glCopyPixels/glDrawPixels etc. then using it will probably be slower then using SDL software blitting (I've read somewhere that in some cases using those functions may be slower then actually reading from hard drive...).
But if you set up ortho mode and use OGL textures instead, you'll get huge performance boost and for free effects such like stretching, alpha blending, rotating etc.
I'm already using OpenGL like this for some time and I'm very happy for switching to OGL (see me smiling? :-D)

Heh heh heh. This is a project I have been working on for some time now. Follow the links in my sig to my home page. On the bottom of that is a link to a zip file containing an early pre-alpha release.

I tried to keep it looking as much like SDL as possible.