I setup a VM with rawhide. I noticed it has the SDL12-compat library instead of SDL. I tried out anagramarama and shippy1984. (Shippy1984 in Fedora uses SDL2 but I compiled the SDL version from source.) Both of them pop up the window saying the program is taking a long time to respond do you want to kill it or wait. Anagramarama fails to run because the VM doesn’t have working sound for some reason but that isn’t SDL12-compat’s fault.
I tried out FTL, Abe, Amoebax and, Critical Mass. FTL worked fine. Abe and Amoebax worked fine if I switched them to disable sound. Critical Mass doesn’t load because of the lack of sound. There is no option to disable sound that I found. Overall I think sdl12-compat is working fine. The broken sound on my VM seems to be the problem.