Interesting. I guess SDL is a little quirky.

Over the next few weeks (depending on my free time from work) I'm going to implement the characters and maps in XNA for my own prototyping purposes.  If it works out and there is enough interest, I'd be happy to post the relevant parts to Flare assets as a library on github.

I know most open source fans aren't particularly fond of C# (for many valid reasons), but IMHO you really can't beat it for rapid prototyping :)