SDL in MinGW Developer Studio

Setting up SDL in MinGW Developer Studio

Last Updated 3/12/06

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 Mingw32 development library

Open gz archive and there should be a *.tar archive inside.
Open the *.tar and there should be a folder side of that.
Open the folder and it'll contain a bunch of subfolders.

Copy the contents of the lib subfolder to the MinGW lib folder.
The MinGW lib folder should be at C:\MinGWStudio\MinGW\lib.

After that, open the include subfolder in the archive and extract the folder named "SDL" to the MinGW include folder, which should be at C:\MinGWStudio\MinGW\include.

Note: Some versions of SDL won't have a folder named "SDL" in the archive's include subfolder, but just a bunch of header files. To get around this simply create a folder named "SDL" in your MinGW include folder and copy all the header files from the archive to that folder you made.

Now take the SDL.dll from the archive (it should be inside the bin 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 MinGW Developer Studio and start a new empty project.

Go to the project settings.

Under the Link tab, paste:

mingw32, SDLmain, SDL

in the libraries field.

Add source new source file to the project and 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.