SDL 1.2.9 has been released and this is what has changed....
<blockquote>

# Added support for direct color 8-bpp surfaces
# Altivec optimized blitters
# SDL.dll works on Windows 95 again
# Dropping a document onto an SDL app passes it as a command line parameter in MacOS X
# Fixed crash trying to allocate hardware surfaces on MacOS X
# Fixed short read problem with SDL_RWFromMem()
# Fixed gcc parse errors in SDL_audio.h on Windows
# Added support for Tru64 UNIX 4.X
# Improved RISC OS support
# Numerous improvements to the Atari port
# SDL_OPENGLBLIT is officially obsolete

</blockquote>