Even though I totaly like the work of Richard Bannister I have a few issues with one of his emulators - the Atari 5200 emulator to be exact. It doesn't work for me like I expected it so I went looking for a proper OSX port of M.E.S.S..

To my surprise there were only PowerPC binaries available (well, at least I havent found any other within 10mins of digging through Google). Even though there is a nice GUI frontend available which is already a universal binary application.

So I fetched the sdlmess 1.0.9 sources and did a compile on my own. Since I had in mind to do an optimized build for my Core2Duo Mac I didn't care much about universal binary and biggest compatibility with other INTeL cpus. I found that these GCC 4.0 compiler settings should give the best performance on my Core2Duo: -march=pentium-m -mtune=pentium-m -msse3. As soon as there is a GCC 4.3 available one could also use: -march=memrom -mtune=merom -mmni.

SDL is linked statically into the sdlmess binary so there is no need for installing a certain version of the SDL framework on your computer. Please report any issues with this build

Just the sdlmess binary: sdlmess_0.109_core2duo.zip
The binary plus the GUI frontend: MacSDLMESSJul292006.zip