hey,
sure, windows sometimes corrupts itself. Nothing new there.
Especially if the code you are working on passes in incorrect values,
and is overwriting memory it shouldn't.
It is easy to crash many machines with a few well crafted opengl,
directx (or other video API) calls.
If using non-buggy code, that doesn't do buffer overwrites and such I
think you wouldn't have as many problems with directx.
cheers,
On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Lenard Lindstrom <len-l@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just had personal confirmation that SDL, maybe with the help of Pygame,
does have DirectX issues. After repeated runs of surfarray_test.py and
related programs my antiquated system(*) reached the point that a simple
pygame.init() call would segfault. I confirmed it was DirectX by changing
the video driver to windib. That worked. And to further confirm it was a
corrupted DirectX and not Python I tried the dxdiag.exe video tests. They
failed. Only a system reboot cleared the problem. At that point I also
confirmed that non of the other programs I was using depended on DirectX.
Only Python/Pygame caused ddraw.dll and dsound.dll to be loaded and kept
alive by that suspicious ddhelp.exe character. Apparently DirectX has a
memory.
So what to do. Maybe it is time to defer to the judgment of the SDL
developers and just let windib be the default Windows video driver. The
documentation can suggest that anyone experiencing performance problems try
directx.
Lenard
(*) Windows 98, DirectX 8.0 (And no, I don't want to see what DX 9 or higher
will do for me. It would probably break something).