This is because you're not looking very hard. If you look at Ryan's ports over
at http://icculus.org/ many of the games (some he's _paid_ to port) use SDL
statically linked in. There's no legal or technical problem with this.
Really, what you're talking about already exists. If anything, you need to
convince the SDL guys (not the kernel guys) to make SDL more comprehensive OR
write your own multimedia library, perhaps based on or backending to SDL.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, most games use 3D hardware exclusively, and
only really care about the OS for initialising a video mode and playing
sound.
Most ports probably suffer the worst from the lack of DirectX APIs on Linux,
something which the WINE project is trying to solve. Using libwine, one will
eventually be able to write native Linux applications that use the DirectX
APIs. Porting should then be very much easier.
Of course, vendors using OpenGL gain Macintosh portability amongst other
things, and most of the really big titles do have OpenGL render modes, which
are already largely portable.
--
Cheers,
Alistair.
Final year Computer Science undergraduate.
1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK.
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