Make no mistake, you've been very helpful; I'm grateful.

If I understand you're cautionary note there, it sounds as if the rabbit hole maybe goes deeper than I first realized. Initially I made the (unconscious) assumption that the pre-built SDL2 libs I grabbed were built with mingw/g++...but in reality I think it's more likely they were built with VS. Now I realize I've made the same assumption about mingw-w64 itself. @_@ Possibly it too was built with VS (to function easily in Windows) which may further stymie my efforts here.

Whew, haha.

Building SDL2 using mingw was pretty simple, it's just a cmake -G"MinGW Makefiles" followed by a mingw32-make.

Building SDL2 using mingw was pretty simple, it's just a cmake -G"MinGW Makefiles" followed by a mingw32-make.

Nice!

@thade: you can download CMake, an open-source build system, here. Try and build SFML from source (both Debug and Release) as well, you'll gain useful knowledge in the process.

If you still want an answer to the original question...

||Warning: .drectve `/manifestdependency:"type='win32' name='Microsoft.VC90.CRT' version='9.0.21022.8' processorArchitecture='amd64' publicKeyToken='1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b'" /DEFAULTLIB:"MSVCRT" /DEFAULTLIB:"OLDNAMES" ' unrecognized|

If I remember correctly, MinGW follows UNIX standards, so options start with - and --, while Microsoft's tools follow DOS standards - so options start with /.

I'm not a command-line expert, but these seem to be linker options for Visual Studio's toolset. Go around Code::Blocks settings and get rid of them, if possible. If you can't find them, open the Code::Blocks project file with a text editor, find and delete them. This should fix the problem.

Thanks Ultra and Georger. :) I'll give cmake a whirl and check back in.

@dilyan, I think what you're saying is /manifestdependency and /DEFAULTLIB are options, and you're suggesting the fix is to remove those options (instead of trying to find alternatives)?

Full-disclosure: after another round with this last night, I took georger's advice to heart...I set up Visual Studio 2013 (upgrading from '10) and got to work, which was a breath of fresh air haha. :)

Thank you all for your time and brainpower; I learned a lot suffering through this. :)

Thanks Ultra and Georger. I'll give cmake a whirl and check back in.

@dilyan, I think what you're saying is /manifestdependency and /DEFAULTLIB are options, and you're suggesting the fix is to remove those options (instead of trying to find alternatives)?

Full-disclosure: after another round with this last night, I took georger's advice to heart...I set up Visual Studio 2013 (upgrading from '10) and got to work, which was a breath of fresh air haha.

Thank you all for your time and brainpower; I learned a lot suffering through this.

I've made a VS2013EE template for 32-bit SDL2 applications as well (download link at the end of the linked forum thread).

@dilyan, I think what you're saying is /manifestdependency and /DEFAULTLIB are options, and you're suggesting the fix is to remove those options (instead of trying to find alternatives)?

They are options (or command-line flags, arguments, parameters, whatever). Some of them I recognize as linker options. For some reason, you've got them passed down to your MinGW linker, and it complains that they are unfamiliar to it.

I do not recommend that you go back to Code::Blocks. This was intended as an answer to your original question, in case you were still curious.

I do not recommend that you go back to Code::Blocks. This was intended as an answer to your original question, in case you were still curious.

Why not? For people who don't want to or can't use Microsoft's SDK and opt to use GCC instead, it's pretty decent.

I don't mind Code::Blocks; I like that it spits out all of it's command-line fu so clearly (and that it doesn't marry me to the nightmarish telescoping makefiles of Visual Studio). VS's IDE is far superior and I'm far more used to it to boot, but as IDEs go I don't mind it.

Why not? For people who don't want to or can't use Microsoft's SDK and opt to use GCC instead, it's pretty decent.

I said "I do not recommend" as in "this isn't what I wanted to say". I was quite curious, so I've used all IDEs I could find, and there are a lot of them. From the free IDEs I liked QtCreator and Eclipse the most. But this is much like saying I prefer blonde blue-eyed women.