Looks like I'm having what happened in the second topic linked to - I don't have any other MinGW installations, the one and ONLY one I have on my windows machine is the one that came in the prepackaged version downloaded from the beta site page.
Not being a coder/programmer, I don't have any other compilers or programming tools, libraries, etc. on my machine.
So in other words, if the MinGW I'm using is an old version, that means the prepackaged codeblocks package comes with an outdated version of MinGW and needs to be updated. That's the only MinGW I have - the one from the prepackaged ZIP file.
BTW, the rest of the game compiles fine and runs OK, although I'm forced to download precompiled maps to make it work.