I am trying to use static linking in my project and at run-time, strange things seem to happen, like access violations where in regular linking mode they work fine!

I can't really understand why this happens but I have in my code just the preprocessor options to do static linking or not and when I do static linking, it makes my data file and bitmap loading functions fail for some reason!

I get access violations trying to load the bitmaps

In debug mode, static link it fails in _stub_bank_switch
In release mode, static link, it fails in bmp_write_line (/* bank switch function */)
But my program works fine doing the dynamic linking!

Is there something that I might be overlooking or might be blind to

I did everything as the quoted text says but I don't know what you mean by this: "I don't know the required arguments to allegro-config off the top of my head."

Minimal example demonstrates my troubles. It crashes on load_bitmap with an access violation in a bitmap line reading routine. I am running 4.2.2 with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 on Windows XP

The program crashes with an access violation in the runtime when I do the load_bitmap line. Also on load_datafile, load_font or anything, and I just don't know why. It errors here:

uintptr_t _stub_bank_switch(BITMAP *bmp, int y)
{
   return (uintptr_t)bmp->line[y];
}

That preprocessor define works. I don;'t exactly even understand the problem but that fixes the linkage with alleg_s. I also wanted to try using alleg_s_crt.lib because vista always complains about like the SxS and the runtime libraries

I tried compiling it with alleg_s_crt first in the list for my linker options in vc++ 2008 but it failed with

Maybe I just need to fiddle with it somemore somehow

The settings I tried to use to make it work with allegro_s_crt:

/MT - Multi-threaded run time library as is the allegro_s_crt, different from /MD, used for the msvcrt dll
/NODEFAULTLIB - Ignore the default msvcrt

Additional dependencies: alleg_s_crt.lib dinput.lib ddraw.lib dxguid.lib winmm.lib dsound.lib

Project file here: http://zxcvbn.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pixelvalentine/Allegro%20Test%202/Allegro%20Test%202.vcproj

Should I be trying to do this at all? I was just annoyed that when I try to share my app the users get SxS errors and have to get the vcredist.

Edit: Also it occured to me, that I am using C++ -- not any C++ libraries but it is compiling as C++, will this mess up the linker symbols and make this whole thing not work?

If you're compiling C code to be linked with C++ code, then you should wrap the C function declarations in extern "C" {/*....*/} to have those functions use C linkage. However if you're just compiling it as C++ instead then you shouldn't have any problems aside from making any necessary conversions to C++.

You're missing several libraries from the list in my last post - allegro needs to be linked to those, and that's why there are undefined reference errors. Specifically, you missed these between linking to allegro and the rest of the libraries :

-lkernel32 -luser32 -lgdi32 -lcomdlg32 -lole32

So it seems you need to add kernel32.lib, user32.lib, gdi32.lib, comdlg32.lib, and ole32.lib to your additional dependencies.

No, just use the normal functions allegro provides access to. You don't need to use a different set of functions to link to the same library.

Did you add the other dependencies for static linking?