What version of SDL is used on respectively OpenBSD, FreeBSD and
Archlinux ?
What window managers have you tried besides mwm, dtwm and fvwm ?
You say that both abuse and c-dogs work with CDE. Have you tried
lbreakout ?
It is an SDL game, and I remember that it was working with the LGPL CDE
Many SDL games will not render correctly on CDE, the same is for mwm,
and fvwm which are really similar to dtwm. I believe this is a new
issue.
The same behaviour does not happen in say some of the more conventional
WMs and DEs, I believe it to be a new bug with sdl, as I remember
playing sdl gam