here is an updated SDL1.x for the PI:
http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/pi/sdl/sdl1/
(debian packages in deb / debian source packages in deb-src, patches over the wheezy sdl in patches)
it overwrites the wheezy sdl, and offers a fixed up framebuffer output + optional updated dispmanx support. Usually with SDL1 you can switch the videodriver with the env variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER, but so we don't affect SDL2, I have changed this to SDL1_VIDEODRIVER
export SDL1_VIDEODRIVER="fbcon"
will use the framebuffer for output (with rpi fixes from pssc)
export SDL1_VIDEODRIVER="dispmanx"
will use dispmanx for output. Code is based on work done by vanfanel (thanks).
Info:
Recently with a new rpi firmware update, SDL1.x got more unreliable, due to bugs in the way it makes assumptions regarding memory locations. This caused it to produce a black screen for many programs. You can read about the problem here - https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/354 - Luckily someone called pssc had already fixed the main issue as part of their squeezeplay work, and so I incorporated the fix into an updated SDL package.
I then decided it would be nice to have dispmanx output in the library, saving having multiple SDLs lying around built with different options (since the dispmanx sdl didn't play nicely with everything), and so had a look at https://github.com/vanfanel/SDL12-kms-dispmanx .
I stripped it down, removed a lot of code I didn't think was needed, and made some improvements - such as fixing a crash for me with advmame + sdl (and other code that called SDL_GetVideoInfo/ListModes), rewriting the scaling code, removing an exit(0), fixing a double free issue, de-duplicating it by making it share the SDL input/video headers, and some other bits. it's possible I removed stuff that was put in for a reason too, as the comments were hard to follow being in Spanish

Please do try it and let me know how you get on.
I also have some Raspbian packages for SDL2 - http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/pi/sdl/sdl2/ if that is useful to anyone.
All this work was done as part of / for the retropie project - http://blog.petrockblock.com/retropie/
[edit] found a few things in the dispmanx code that I need to revisit, but would still be useful if people can test. the framebuffer side of things should still be an improvement over the wheezy sdl, whether the dispmanx code is used or not. Thanks.