10 December 2024

Featured Post: Retrogaming Emulation on Apple Silicon

This featured post is in steady update. 

Last update 10 December 2024 - added short entry for the PS3, as RPCS3 now provides native builds for Silicon Macs.

19 October 2024 - added WolfMAME/MAME Action Replay Page, thank you, Mr. Unknown!

3 October 2024 - small update for Arcade, as the MAME 2003 RetroArch cores improved on Apple Silicon as well.

6 August 2024 - small update of for N64 (mupen 2.6.0 release), GameCube (RetroAchievements in Dolphin), and Darkplaces (still compiles smoothly).

23 March 2024 - added TyrQuake in the Quake for PC section for the sake of completeness.

2 March 2024 - added GBA section and applied links to the Table of Content as well as a lot of shoe polish to the entry. 

Table of Content

(links in this TOC only work in the actual blog post, but not on the homepage)

About this Blog

Statistics tell me that my info about MAME on Apple Silicon is having highest popularity and became a kind of landing page for the entire blog. Here I give a broader overview. As emulators still improve, this blog post will be revisited from time to time. Sorted in accordance with my own experience (in particular only own dumps of my console games). 

But first - what is so peculiar about emulating old games?

In a nutshell, dedicated enthusiasts preserve gaming history for no money. As the old arcade machines increasingly wear off, emulators build virtual machines around its games. This alone is fascinating, but the community does much more: It also preserves the artwork, photos of the controllers and the PCBs, even the old manuals. And the only thing they expect from you is respect and gratitude 😊. Of course you can also contribute in other ways (like I do with this blog).
Work is mostly done under open source licenses, so this work remains free. I am a bit hesitant to (always) buy into the commercial variants, as they basically perpetuate the income from old arcade games. But there are definitely nice commercial offers: I bought the Capcom Classics (1942, 1943, etc) for Nintendo Switch, and it‘s quite comparable to the open source variants (plus an acceptable way to play it on the Switch, however e.g. both 1942 and 1943 stutter on my Switch from time to time). Other commercial offerings, such as Metal Slug on the Switch, are a bit disappointing, as they provide you a bare bones emulation without upscaling and just scanlines - they should do better.

Why this focus on MacOS emulation?


Motivation has changed through time. When I started this blog in 2016, its main purpose was to fill a huge gap by explaining how to run MAME on Macs. Documentation was scarce or non-existent back then. 

Nowadays documentation got much better, and I see Silicon Macs as a quite unique emulation platform - emulation on the Mac mini shines like never before. You are getting decent performance paired with highest energy efficiency, thus no noise or heat at all. Compared to a quite noisy and hot Nintendo Switch, a Silicon Mac is a much quieter and cooler gaming device. Gaming PCs, while more powerful, are clumsy, can be noisy and always emit a lot of warm air. With most emulation, Apple Silicon performance will just be stellar or at least very fine.

That’s why I also started to cover other than arcade emulation, simply because you can get very convincing results on Silicon Macs. I would not want to trade thus package in for something different.


What about those RetroAchievements?


I consider them as a game changer for all retrogaming. While cheevos shines on more complex console emulation, they are increasingly fun on arcades as well (with just recently brilliant achievements for 1942 and Bubble Bobble). I also discovered new things via RetroAchievements that I had not been aware of. That‘s why I will always prefer emulators supporting RetroAchievements over others.


So many words to read here - why don‘t you do videos?


Call me old-fashioned, but reading is remembering. Sure, there is great YouTube content out there, but when it comes to learning things, I prefer the written word, as you engage more actively with it. And with the more complicated configuration instructions, videos get overly complicated to make (and to use as well). I also revisit my blog entries and update them, and that seems hardly feasible with videos.


With this in mind, let's have a look into the emulation scene with a focus on Silicon Macs.


Arcade Games

3 October 2024
Still the main focus of this Blog, and my own preferences shifted significantly through the years.

No.1 - FinalBurn Neo/RetroArch Core (excellent): My current golden standard in arcade emulation in MacOS/iOS. As soon as you have tamed RetroArch, you get best-in-class performance (also due to the 60Hz core option, which can be a live saver), HDR in Vulkan and now working screenshots, shaders (see my koko-aio repository) and RetroAchievements. Highscore support steadily increases. Emulation of some very old games and newer games is missing - here you may revert to MAME official. This RetroArch core is updated very frequently. Discord (if you like it) has a lively user community.

No.2 - MAME/RetroArch Cores (very good): These days MAME (current) is in sync with official MAME. In RetroArch, you get HDR and the shaders, and my koko-aio repository works with identical presets now. However, RetroAchievements are missing/not officially supported. Compared to offical MAME, highscore support has problems and is hard to install. This is my choice for all games that FinalBurn Neo does not support. I also mention the old MAME 2003/2003 plus cores, which are avaialble for Silicon Macs. Especially the 2003 plus core gained a lot of stability recently, and it might be a good alternative to the rather big MAME(current) core with long loading times. Highscore support is old school and similar to FinalBurn Neo, but easier to handle in RetroArch. You of course need a different romset, then it might be worth a try. 

No.3 - official MAME (very good): You may call it heresy, but I hardly use official MAME these days, as FinalBurn Neo outperforms it and the MAME (current) RetroArch core is in sync and good enough. Shaders are ok, but can no longer compete with a powerful RetroArch shader as koko-aio is. Download the official MacOS builds here - but as of MAME 262, no MacIntel builds are available (you need to compile them by yourself). Otherwise not much more to say here. But as most of the new emulation development seems to happen here, MAME official is the main reference for any technical issues you may experience e.g. with RetroArch cores. So is a game does weird things for you, always also check behavior in official MAME.

No.4 - WolfMAME (very good): Thanks to Mr. Unknown below, I became aware of WolfMAME for MacOS. Never heard of it before, and it is closely linked to the MAME Action Replay Page - which is actually a very cool thing. I also successfully compiled my own WolfMAME from the source code of the WolfMAME GitHub Repository - if you wanna be on the safe side. From my limited testing, I could record an own inp file, but so far I failed to replay any of the nice inp files from the website. It would be great to see the real masters playing my favorite games, but that seems quite tricky.

No.5 - OpenEmu (very good): With a surprise release 2.4.1 in December 2023 after two years of silence, OpenEmu is back. If you hate all this configuration effort, this emulator is definitely worth a try. While it is Intel binaries only, it runs sufficiently well on my M2 Mac mini. The MAME 250 core is in the Experimental Build of OpenEmu. Installation is like any other MacOS app, joypad configuration is very good, and shaders are loaded from within the game with the mouse. If you are fine with the MAME 250 core (probably yes for classic arcade games), you might be better of with OpenEmu compared to official MAME for an acceptable gameplay. OpenEmu also provides tons of other console emulators. But it cannot match RetroArch performance (and doesn't want to, because it wants to provide you with an out-of-the-box solution with no tweaking possibilities).

Bottom line: With so much choice, you cannot complain. All four alternatives are rock stable and provide ready binaries.
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