Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

OWC: We Make DIY Upgrading Easy! Maximize your Apple MacBook / MacBook Pro. Up to 8.0GB Memory, up to 1.0TB HD & More. Easy Guide + Free, Detailed Installation Videos. Click here

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

One More Thing

Introduction to Emulation on the Mac

- 2008.01.02

Popularity: LEMLEMLEMLEM

del.icio.us Bookmark in del.icio.us Slashdot Suggest to Slashdot

For years now, our PC brethren have been able to enjoy the simple pleasures of vintage games consoles through a process known as emulation, and article upon article can be found through a Google search relating to how to do this on a Windows machine.

When it comes to emulation on the Mac, for the most part we have it just as good as our virus riddled friends, but there is a dearth of information on the subject.

I have written a series of articles to address that, and playing old and long since abandoned games is one of the many things I love doing on my MacBook.

Due to the sprawling complexity of the emulation scene, I will deal with every aspect of it across a series of articles. This one will serve as an introduction to the wonderful world of console emulation on the Macintosh.

The Mac Has No Games?

"The Mac has no games!" your PC owning friends exclaims with an expression of cutting ridicule. I have to give a hearty "lol" to that statement, because through emulation you can potentially increase the Macs gaming library by thousands of titles.

In this series I will focus on emulation software that was built to run in OS X, as this is the easiest and most efficient way of playing old games on a Mac. There are other more convoluted methods that I will mention here and will discuss in more detail later.

The basics are as follows. To enable playing an old video game on your Mac you need two elements, emulation software and a ROM image file of a specific game. From within the emulator, you locate and load up the ROM image file stored on your hard drive, and from there you should be presented with a window proudly displaying the title screen of the chosen game. To play the game, you can use the keyboard, with the joypad layout of the emulated console mapped to the keys. In some cases the emulator will allow you to connect a USB joypad to provide an even more accurate recreation of playing the console. The steps described here are essentially the same for every emulator, and they all use the same principles.

Copyright

There is a thorny issue with regard to downloading the ROM images themselves. For instance, Nintendo have been known to email websites that host archives containing thousands of NES ROM images. In the eyes of a video game company, downloading a ROM image of Super Mario Bros. 3 is tantamount to stealing the original game from a store.

It took a few years before the wide use of console emulation registered on the radars of game giants like Nintendo, and ironically, as a result of the rise in popularity of console emulation Nintendo now provide a ROM download service for the Wii. The Wii console itself comes equipped with built in emulators for consoles like the MegaDrive, NES, SNES, and N64. Of course, Nintendo want you to pay for the ROM images, and to them its no more than "money for old rope".

The bite is for an old NES game such as the legendary Mario 3, you could end up paying £3 or £4. Quite a lot for a 19-year-old game you could pick up for half that on eBay, and that would be for a real cartridge!

A general rule of thumb is that you can download the ROM files of games you already own the real life versions of, while games you don't own you need to delete after 24 hours. I'm not sure how watertight this would be in a court of law, but it seems reasonable to me. [Editor's note: Strictly speaking, unless you own the game that the ROM file came from or that game has been released to the public, you are violating copyright law if you download ROM images. The 24 hour thing is an urban legend. We do not condone breaking copyright law. dk]

Emulators and Windows

There are other forms of video game emulation on the Mac that involve more modern games that appeared on the PC for both the DOS and Windows platforms. For a long time all but the oldest DOS games were nigh on impossible to play on a Mac. With the PowerPC reigning supreme at Apple for more than a decade, anything Wintel related was isolated from Mac users (or just emulated slowly! Virtual PC anyone?), and this was especially true of the games.

The advent of Intel chips nestling inside Macs has changed this dramatically. Theoretically, if it runs on a Windows PC, there will be some way to run it on an Intel Mac. To do this you would install Windows XP either using Boot Camp or via virtualisation software such as VMWare Fusion. This would cover running new PC games, as well anything that can run under Windows XP, making for a sizable collection of titles spanning many years.

There are certain defunct game consoles that do not have an emulator with an OS X edition. This is true of the original PlayStation, the Dreamcast, Sega CD, and several more obscure systems. With Windows XP in your arsenal, your covered here as well.

On the subject of playing old DOS games that may not be supported in XP, there is a solution that doesn't require you to leave the comforts of our beloved OS X: its called DOSbox. DOSbox is an MS-DOS emulator designed specifically to run old DOS games not supported in Windows. It's available as a universal binary, meaning you can use it on your PowerPC Mac and still enjoy those formerly PC restricted classics. Performance is better on an Intel Mac due to the fact that DOS ran on x86 processors throughout its lifespan. Its a great way to play Doom 1 & 2, Wolfenstein 3D, Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer, Elite, and many more besides.

That just about covers the current state of vintage game playing on the Mac. In the next article I will introduce you to the options available to allow play of old console games within OS X for popular 8- and 16-bit systems we all loved during our childhood. LEM

Recent One More Thing articles

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

Recent Deals

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

This article copyright ©2008 by Trevor Wale. Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

Custom Search

Amazon.com

Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Video Cards
Email Lists

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
B&H
MacMall
TechRestore
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.