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Mission Statement

Lots of people dislike DirectX, for one reason or another. Some say it is too complicated, others don't like being locked into a single development platform. For whatever reason, people look for alternatives. For a long time, the alternatives available have been a bunch of separate systems that were not built to work together in the same way that DirectX's components do. However, there is SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer. It is a cross-platform library for creating multi-media applications. For our purposes, this means games. Since it is cross-platform, and I mean TRULY cross platform, it doesn't matter what platform you are developing on. If you develop carefully, you will be able to take the exact same source code onto a different platform, and it will compile and work in exactly the same manner.

The mission of this article is to get you up and running in SDL on the WIN32 platform. For a long time, I have been primarily a WIN32 programmer, and while this might change in the future, I know that many of you are also WIN32 programmers, so we at least have that in common. During this article, we won't do a whole heck of a lot. We'll get SDL installed and a simple example program that shows a blank window. Believe it or not, that is the hardest part of SDL development. The rest is incredibly easy.

So, to begin, here are the Topical Guide Objectives for this article:

TGO-01-A	Know where to get SDL.
TGO-01-B	Know how to set up Visual C++ 6.0 for SDL development.
TGO-01-C	Know how to start an SDL based project in Visual C++ 6.0.
TGO-01-D	Make a very simple program to test your setup.
TGO-01-E	Make a very simplistic program with SDL

Getting SDL(TGO-01-A)

Naturally, the first part of the process is to download SDL. You can find it at http://www.libsdl.org. At the time of this writing, the most current version of the API is 1.2.3, and that is the version this article deals with. On the SDL site, you want to download the development libraries for WIN32. The site is well laid out, and it should be really easy for you to find it. They distribute the API as a zip file, so you'll need a copy of WinZip or some other type of archive utility to extract the files. Once you have it downloaded, unzip it somewhere, and take a look at the contents.

In the folder you unzip to, there are three subfolders: docs, include, and lib. These are fairly obvious, and we'll take a look at them a little later.

There are also a number of files, like Bugs, Copying, Readme, and so forth. You should take the time to read all of these, especially Bugs and Copying. SDL is released under the LGPL license, and if you intend to use SDL for creating applications that you wish to sell, you'll need to follow the license. See http://www.gnu.org for more information on the LGPL.

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