SDL, VNC and ARAnyM

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org>]

Hi!

I’m using ARAnyM to emulate m68k machines, and it uses SDL as
backend which currently forces me to do one of these two things
if I want to run a VM on a remote machine:

• run with dummy backend, so I get all the console messages of
  the VM on stdout (but stdin is ignored, so the Linux console
  is not interactive)

• run with X11 backend in a tightvncserver or vnc4server, so
  I get dmesg on stdout and a usable (typing and reading) console
  in an X11 window… except VNC gets the keys wrong, so if I type
  e.g. 'asd' I get 'abf', differing but consistent results that
  depend on the first key I press (plus there’s issues with the
  mouse cursor)

Neither of these two help when I need to access the Linux console
of the VM, e.g. to fsck the root filesystem, or if I want to use
say GEM or FreeMiNT on it. My own local machines do not have the
CPU capacity required to emulate an Atari with sufficient speed
to not drive me insane.

Which is why I was hoping for an SDL VNC backend, so I can just
run ARAnyM in the background and connect to it using VNC possibly
over SSH. Maybe that would get the keys right…?

(I assume any full-system emulation would need to use scancodes.
Me using a ~/.Xmodmap with a heavily custom layout probably doesn’t
help, either.)

Additionally, I was toying with the idea of integrating ARAnyM with
libvirt (despite hating libvirt, XML and everything in between), so
one could create and manage Atari m68k VMs with virt-manager just
like we do with PC i386/amd64 VMs at work that use kvm (or qemu).
To use the display, this would also require VNC.

How’s the status of integrating your backend into SDL 1.2 “proper”?
(Since SDL 2.0 is brand-new no applications are using it yet, so
that’s future music.)

Would integrating the patch as-is (it’s from 2010 AFAICT!) into
distro packaging of SDL 1.2 break anything (if the VNC backend
is not selected)? If not I’d probably try to get it into Debian
or, if must be, roll my own packages. (Best would be if it could
just be installed as a plugin that SDL loads when prompted, but
I have no idea whether that’s possible.)

Thanks in advance,
//mirabilos
PS: https://wiki.debian.org/Aranym/Quick if you want to toy
-- 
Sometimes they [people] care too much: pretty printers [and syntax highligh-
ting, d.A.] mechanically produce pretty output that accentuates irrelevant
detail in the program, which is as sensible as putting all the prepositions
in English text in bold font.	-- Rob Pike in "Notes on Programming in C"