OpenEmu - A New Strong Contender for MacOS MAME

These days I revisited OpenEmu after quite some time, and it is a fair statement that it became an extremely attractive contender for playing MAME in MacOS.

This shall only serve as a teaser for an in-depth review - just briefly what makes OpenEmu a compelling option for gaming MAME in MacOS:

• Up to date - current MAME Core is 0.217 (note: the MAME Core only comes with the "Experimental" version of OpenEmu!).
• Performance is extremely good. OpenEmu claims to have developed a Metal backend for better performance in MacOS. While there is nothing documented about this, so far all games work flawlessly. A more objective testing than playing games you know does not seem to be available.
• Shaders built in, can be changed in the game on the fly. It is by far the most convenient way of applying shaders for MAME games. And you find CRT-GEOM or even CRT-Royale-Kurozumi amongst them! Shader options are also very convenient.
• And of course outstanding usability, which you will not find in any other MAME emulator:
• import roms by drag'n'drop and enjoy immediate scans for artwork; import also provides a smart mechanism for resolving conflicts with other emulators; if you launch a game with missing roms (e.g. neogeo.zip), OpenEmu tells you this; also importing of bios files is drag'n'drop (more important for the other emulators)
• outstanding configuration of joypads, with a lot of them being recognized automatically
• Autostate out of the box: MAME currently does not save hiscore files in OpenEmu, and there is nothing to worry about that. Because OpenEmu, by its default options, just autosaves your last state and resume there at restart. So your highscores are just saved by savestates, and that's just fine.

I wanted to write this teaser very fast because OpenEmu now has reached a state where it becomes a top option for MAME in MacOS. In my review, I will also elaborate on the current deficits (e.g. no Artwork), but all in all, for the casual arcade gamer, this software is just brilliant. Stay tuned, I need to test further.

Read further for my in-depth review of OpenEmu (this review is reduced to the MAME core, wile OpenEmu's potential obviously go far beyond MAME emulation):