Due to the way Pentium Ms handle TSC and the related assembly, SDLcam in its current state (v0.7.3 plus the Gentoo patches) does not work on those CPUs (usually, it fails on startup). I've created a patch that adresses this issue (TSC timing) so that it works on Pentium Ms. I've submitted it to the maintainer and he will release a new version. But according to him this will take some time, so I'm submitting it here, too. I've tested the resulting binaries on all x86 hardware I have (PIII, PIV, PM, AthXP) and found no problems. As the original assembly code didn't work elsewhere (SDLcam has an alternative codepath without assembly), I've not bothered testing it anywhere else.
Created attachment 70575 [details, diff] TSC assembly fix for SDLcam 0.7.3
thanks, now in portage