Move the renderer away from SDL

[Aloshi]

Right now, ES renders at about 5fps - making input a little laggy and animation impossible. Moving to another rendering framework would be good - perhaps Qt, as it has a Pi-specific release? Whatever the renderer, it needs to be able to display text and load/display images.

[Aloshi]

I think Qt is out of the picture - it requires several hundreds of megabytes of libraries to install and is a bit overkill. I might just have to write my own OpenGL ES rendering functions. The downside is this will limit ES to only run on the Raspberry Pi (unless I write another renderer for normal OpenGL).

[Aloshi]

An update! I've been very hard at work on the new renderer for the past few days (I think I've spent nearly 15 hours on it!). I have a version of Renderer::drawRect working perfectly, and Renderer::drawText working almost perfectly (colors don't work yet). This is all in a separate project. I have yet to merge it with EmulationStation, and I still need to do image loading.

A bit of a benchmark - drawing the string "RANDOM TEXT" 200 times brings me to about 20-30fps. That's a lot of text (and my framerate reporting code may have been bad).

A very poor-quality picture, of drawing a red rectangle and some text: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2816162/text_at_last.jpg

[petrockblog]

That sounds great! If you need beta testers just send me a message.

[Aloshi]

And now we start to see the performance difference (it flickers between 58fps and 60fps): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2816162/getting_closer.jpg

Still have to fix font sizing and reimplement the special image stuff (e.g. tiling, resizing).

(P.S. If my frequent updates are annoying anyone with emails, you can mute posts for this particular issue at the bottom of the page)

[Xevin-zz]

Not annoying me at all. I look forward to every time I get a new email with your name on it.

60 fps is fantastic! That's more then I imagined! Can wait for the merge.

[Aloshi]

And done (but probably a little buggy with themes).