I need help on where to put sdl.dll because i want to program games

Question

I read that I can copy SDL.dll to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 so my SDL app will find SDL.dll even if it's not in the same directory. But I'm using The 64bit version of Windows 7, and i read that I'll want to put the dll in C:\Windows\SysWOW64. But I think I'll only be programming in 32 bit because thats the regular or more popular way so i dont want to confuse myself. i already put sdl.dll in c:\Windows\SYSTEM32. thanks for reading

Answer 1

Honestly, you shouldn't do that. The first reason is that different applications may use different versions of SDL and different users may have different versions of SDL already provided. That can lead to some confusing errors. The second is that, when you want to try the program on a different computer, you can easily forget to supply needed DLLs.

If you really want to have a shared DLL on your work computer and you use MinGW, you can put the DLL in the MinGW/bin directory, the effect will be just like putting it in the system directory. But I would really recommend simply providing the libraries right next to the compiled executable, you do it once and you can safely distribute the program.