Now there are a lot of really great cross platform emulators. Snes9x of course Mame are two of the more popular ones available for most platforms, but Magic Engine and GENS do not seem to have complete and functional OS X ports (there was one project to port it over, but it doesn’t appear to have gone far).
So I set out to find alternatives and was somewhat surprised to find several really good ones. In fact, the TurboGraphics 16 emulator for OS X is at least as good as Magic Engine on the PC. While finding a TG16 emulator I found emulators for both SNES and GENESIS that were also really nice, and all three were built on the same front end giving them all a similar set of features wrapped around different emulator cores. (The emulator cores are free and the shell is shareware. This is somewht amusing to me since the shell is the easy part, and the emulator cores themselves are somewhat more complex.)
Overall I’m impressed with the emulation selection on the Mac. I was a little worried that the emulation scene wouldn’t be all that active here in OS X land but it seems to be doing quite well. I was able to get emulators for SNES, GENESIS, TG-16, NES, and GBA, as well as the Amiga. And as you can see from the screen shot, emulation performance is pretty good on the Macbook Pro.
So, uhm, yeah. M
Oh, hush about piracy. I still have the cartridges for Axelay and Sidearms, and once had Life Force. Zero Wing was never released in the US, and it sucks anyway.
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So after you spend all the time to find all the good emulation software….your gonna zip it up and send it to me with all your roms right! All your roms belong to me.
Emulation on the Mac really jumped ahead with the move to Intel. Since all the code to emulate the varying gaming processors had been written for X86 had been written, it was a lot easier to port it all over to the Mac. I was happy to hear this, since emulation on the PPC Macs was lacking at best.
I like the background. Did you pick the Anti-windows green hill and blue sky background consciously, or unconsciously?
It’s intentional. I have the anti-windows Backdrop on my Cinema Display and I have the standard Windows green hill and blue skies on the laptop screen just for sheer silliness of having the Windows backdrop on a Mac.
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