But doing it with a string variable requires you to make it a pointer:
Thats where I made most of my mistakes... lol .
You just put a way-ward ship(me) back on course! That makes perfect sense, thanks for clearing that up.

I previously used Delphi 6 and now I'm using Lazarus. With both I could directly pass a string argument to SDL_LoadBMP
Yes, this example worked perfectly with Lazarus. (It's funny that a 'free' IDE can do some pretty incredible things that an overpriced IDE has problems with or just doesn't even bother to support.)