Greetings, I've decided to compile xmame from source for SuSE 9.3. I've got an athlon xp 1700+ but it sits on a asus a7m 266 motherboard which was out before the xp hit the street (I had at the time used a thunderbird 1200). I've compiled xmame for the athlon-xp architecture but I got the following error when I tried to run it:

$> xmame.SDL
error: compiled byte ordering doesn't match machine byte ordering.
compiled for MSB first, are you sure you chose the right cpu in makefile.unix?

So do I have to actually choose thunderbird or the generic athlon cpu-type? Does the linux kernel (being the default suse one) have anything to do with it?

You'd better not change the config file, except to enable openGL. You have a good enough CPU to skip optimizations.