Allegro 5. Because I'm a fanboy.
I seriously recommend it though, it's really capable and straightforward once you get past the most complicated tutorial which is simply setting up a timer via the Event queue, which you can learn to love or just forget about it. You can get pre-compiled builds for windows that are called monolith builds, which already have all the dependencies linked and you either link them statically or just using a simple DLL that isn't beyond 2-3 MB.
It's focused on all the aspects you need for a Modern 2D game, drawing and using 3D hardware acceleration automatically(either D3D or OpenGL), cross-platform(with iOS support and an Android port in the works I think), and I can assure you it's really easy to work with. For example, if you need to load a bitmap and draw a bitmap you simply do:
ALLEGRO_BITMAP *mybox;
...
mybox = al_load_bitmap("data/box.png");
// Handle if not loaded
if (!mybox) ...
...
// Draw the box to x=300 y=300
al_draw_bitmap(mybox, 300, 300, 0);
...
// Destroy it after you're done with the game
al_destroy_bitmap(mybox);
Give the manual a look and some examples as well. Setting it up is really easy and it just needs some easy setup code at first you don't need to remember at all. I can confirm from experience it's fast to develop with, as I've done some game entries for 72 or
one week contests.
