I think I found the prolem: Your ATI 2mb videoboard.
My first computer was a PII 233mhz and an ATI rage 2MBram and the first game I bought for it was a Formula1 simulation and it was sloooooooooow and was suspended every 10 secs or so.
Things improved drasticly when I just replaced the ATI with a Voodoo Banshee that has at least 8MB ram ( could even be 16 mb but I''m not sure ).
So it looks like your problem is a lack of RAM on your vide board.
I highly suggest to try it with a "decent" videoboard.Of course it wouldn''t hurt if you could upgrade the processor too.
Now to make it clear, I have nothing against ATI and at that time I was a newbie in the conputer field and of course didn''t know about Arstechnica and was not making any difference between a retail 8MB videoboard and the same cheap 2MB OEM version. They were both ATI rage.
Good luck

i had the same ATI some time ago. it must be the slowest video card on the planet!

Sorry, i don''t buy it.

That ATI card might be painfully slow, but 7 fps for a 640x480 blit and a little overdraw for a sprite? If i were you, i''d crack out gperf and see where the bottle-neck is. If it''s in SDL_Blit() or one of the associated functions, then either something''s misconfigured (check the flags you create the screen with), or the card really is that slow. If you''ve built up some infrastructure around the SDL functions, then it might be something there.

ben.c

You''d better buy it

just 800x600x32 gives 1.920 MB almost the amount of the videoram of his videoboard. That''s just for the primary surface, the seconary buffer looks like it will always be in the system ram and the blitting hardware capability of that ATI board ( if they exist ) will never be used.
Now, I agree with you on the point that 7fps is really slow and that his hardware problem is added to an eventual misconfiguration.
It looks like the only real tewst would be to try swapping the ATI videoboard with a more performant one.