SDL in Visual C++ 6.0

Setting up SDL in Visual C++ 6.0

Last Updated 2/20/06

First thing you need to do is download SDL headers and binaries.
You will find them on the SDL website, specifically on .

Scroll Down to the Development Libraries section and download the Windows development library

Open the zip and there should be a folder side of it.
Open the folder and it'll contain a bunch of subfolders.

Copy SDL.lib and SDLmain.lib from the lib subfolder in the archive to the Visual C++ lib folder.
The Visual C++ lib folder should be at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Lib.

Next go to the Visual C++ include folder and create a folder called "SDL".
The Visual C++ include folder should be at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Include.

Then open the include subfolder in the archive and extract its contents to the folder you just made, which should be at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Include\SDL.

Now extract SDL.dll from the archive (it should be inside the lib subfolder), and extract it to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32.
This is so whenever you make an SDL app, the program will be able to find SDL.dll even if SDL.dll is not in the same directory.

Now start up Visual C++ and start a new Win32 project.


Then set it to be empty so nothing is automatically generated.

Then click finish. A new dialog will appear asking you to confirm the empty project, so just click ok.

Next go to project settings.

Under the C/C++ tab, set "Category" to Code Generation. Then set "Use run-time library" to multithreaded dll.

Under the Link tab, paste:

SDL.lib SDLmain.lib

in the Object/Library modules after the long set of libraries.

Add source new source file to the project to test out everything.

Paste the following code into the new source file:

#include "SDL/SDL.h" int main( int argc, char* args[] ) { //Start SDL SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_EVERYTHING ); //Quit SDL SDL_Quit(); return 0; }

Now Compile. Save the new source file if necessary.
If there's no errors, you're finished.

Also, In the archive you just downloaded there's a subfolder called "docs". It contains the SDL documentation.

I highly recommend that you extract them somewhere and keep it for reference.