The Legend of Zelda and Megaman 2 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). F-Zero and Street Fighter II: Turbo on the Super NES. OpenEmu is an amazing retro game emulator for the Mac. Work with a host of retro consoles, including Game Boy (Color and Advance), NeoGeo Pocket. You can set up physical controllers over USB and wireless, including the Wii Remote. Altered Beast and Strider on the Sega Genesis. If you have a Mac and fond memories of game consoles past, read on. The vintage emulator scene—going on 20 years now, by a rough estimation—is constantly evolving. Programs and ROMs that worked several years ago may no longer load now. The Web is littered with emulators that aren't compatible with current operating systems, or ROMs that don't run in their corresponding emulators. The thing is, it's all in good faith. Dedicated volunteer programmers develop better emulators in an effort to improve accuracy and add features. Sometimes that requires new ROMs. Other emulators fall out of favor as developers move on to different projects. Then Windows or Mac OS updates render languishing emulators unstable or otherwise unusable. Don't despair, though. Four years ago, I wrote a lengthy story for our sister site ExtremeTech about how to. When researching that article, I ran into the aforementioned problem pretty often. This time around, I wanted to touch on the Mac side, primarily because of a huge development that has changed the vintage console gaming scene for the better:. OpenEmu to the Rescue Originally released in 2013, OpenEmu is not actually an emulator in and of itself. Instead, it's a robust front end for other console emulators. On its own, that's nothing new; front ends have existed for a long time. What makes OpenEmu different is that it works a lot like a streamlined iTunes—that is, if iTunes were smooth and fast, and not sluggish and confusing. For example, OpenEmu shows you actual box art for each of your games, and sorts them automatically by platform. It lets you make playlists of your favorite games by category across platforms, and universalizes controller schemes for each emulated system—all with easy-to-understand and attractive graphics. OpenEmu doesn't work for computer platforms—you'll still need separate emulators for, say, the. But for game consoles, it's outstanding. And for once, it's a Mac exclusive, instead of something that only works on PCs. The best part: OpenEmu takes care of the core emulation engines behind each platform. When I think of a front end, normally I think of a program I'll have to install alongside a base emulator. But OpenEmu does all that work for you, and comes packaged with integrated cores for popular systems—again with an iTunes-like, or even App Store-like interface. ![]() All you'll need to do is download the cores you want, each one with a single click from within OpenEmu. ROMs and Setup Before we go further, as with every article on game system emulation over the past two decades, I have to issue the standard disclaimer: It's generally illegal to own ROMs of a given arcade machine, cartridge, or CD-ROM unless you own the actual item in question. In reality, though, it's a gray area—especially for titles that aren't available by any other means. I can't link directly to any ROM sites here. RESOLVED use package icon on web page RESOLVED webtools/updates site needs to be changed RESOLVED progress message steps on image text RESOLVED eclipse-jee-helios-M7-win32 doesn't include the JAX-WS tool RESOLVED Welcome Page: Standard links are not working (Samples, Tutorials.) RESOLVED need build to handle about.mappings? Bug ID Title Status tm.terminal should not include source, to save space VERIFIED 200 broken VERIFIED [Java EE package] Community and JPA links in welcome page goes to a 'Not Found' page RESOLVED restore capability bundles RESOLVED remove references to uncertain capabilities bundles RESOLVED the What's new link on the Welcome page does not work RESOLVED javax.transaction is configured as framework extension RESOLVED add jsf feature to Java EE IDE package RESOLVED The MD5 given for this download does not match RESOLVED EclipseGalileo Hanging frequently. Download eclipse ide for java ee developers mac. But I can tell you they're pretty easy to find if you know how to use. Protip: At the time of this writing, there's a really good site that rhymes with Pool Toms. With all that out of the way, let's get started playing games. The version of OpenEmu you want is the Experimental one. That sounds dangerous, but in this case, it just means you'll have vastly extended platform compatibility. Head to and click the arrow to the right of Download Now. Choose OpenEmu Experimental. The app will begin downloading. Once the main download's done, open the DMG archive and drag OpenEmu to your Mac's Applications folder. Download lame exporter for audacity mac. Next, go to the App Store and download The Unarchiver, which is free; you'll need this to open up ROM packs. Playing Games To add games to OpenEmu, simply drag over each ROM you have into the main window on the right side of OpenEmu's interface. OpenEmu will search the Web for box art, but if it can't find it, you can use Google Image Search to locate your own; download it to your desktop first, and then drag the art over to the multicolor-banded image above the ROM, and it will replace it. To get playing, first choose a console from the left-hand side of OpenEmu. ![]() Then select the game you want to play and double-click on the box art. You'll find that within OpenEmu's standard emulators, replication accuracy is superb. The one major hoop I encountered was getting original Sony PlayStation (PS1) games to work. This required a special ROM download in my tests, but with some fiddling, I figured it out. You need to download and drag over several BIOS files, including scph5500.bin, scph5501.bin, and scph5502.bin, and the last one can also be renamed from scph5552.bin if you can't find it directly. I also had to drag this specific file into ~/Library/Application Support/OpenEmu/BIOS, and not just rely on OpenEmu finding it on its own, before PS1 games would play on my test machine.
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