Emulation Update November 2025

November 2025 — an excellent opportunity to present a broad overview of updates in macOS emulation. Since this will cover a diverse range of topics, I plan to combine this post with updates to the corresponding main articles, including links to them. Let’s see how well this approach works, and I hope you enjoy the read.

News Nr 1 - macOS 26.1 “Tahoe” has landed smoothly. 

Despite the widespread criticism surrounding macOS 26 and iOS/iPadOS 26, I actually like all of them. As usual, I waited for the .1 release before updating, and the process went without a hitch. 

The emulators are running well, and I’ll be providing an update on them below anyway.

News Nr 2 - Scaled Resolution and Emulator Performance.

What I realized for the first time these days is the actual impact of scaled resolution on performance - and for official MAME, the effect can be rather dramatic!

macOS 26.1 actually tells you this!

Let’s look at some performance numbers in MAME 282, still running under Sequoia on the Mac Mini M2 Pro. As always, I used a 30‑second run with shaders enabled, while disregarding other ini‑settings. Both the OpenGL and Metal backends were tested. My main takeaways are:

• If you encounter performance issues in MAME, it’s worth checking your scaling settings. Some titles show extreme deviations — 1942 is a good example. 

• The Metal backend in MAME generally performs much better than OpenGL, which is excellent news. 

• Overall, though, performance numbers are solid across all games, with no major concerns irrespective of scaling settings and used backend.

I’ll also be updating the main MAME blog post and linking it here for easy reference.

News Nr. 3 - RetroArch 1.22 is here.

If you’ve been reading this blog from time to time, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of RetroArch. That’s why another stable release is always worth mentioning—even though I personally continue to rely on the Nightly builds.

As of this writing, there’s no official blog post yet, but the stable 1.22 build of RetroArch is already available for download from the Libretro website. With so many changes since the last stable release, it’s difficult to highlight any single update. What I can say for sure is that the macOS version has received excellent dedicated improvements, thanks largely to the tireless work of warmenhoven—huge kudos to him, as always.

I’ll also be updating the main RetroArch blog post and linking it here for easy reference.

News Nr. 4 - RetroArch on an iPad Pro rocks.

After many years of faithful service, my beloved 2019 iPad Air 3 has finally gone into retirement. In its place, I’ve picked up a refurbished M4 iPad Pro - quite a move. While this purchase wasn’t intended for gaming, I couldn’t resist running a few arcade titles under iPadOS 26.1 just to see how they perform.

Retroarch 1.22 with koko-aio shaders and my integrated bezels

Some first insights:

• If you want to stay on the bleeding edge of RetroArch development, sideloading remains as painful as ever. Fortunately, there’s now an official version of RetroArch available in the App Store, and it’s worth considering if it meets your needs.
• RetroArch takes full advantage of the variable refresh rate on my iPad Pro. This feature is particularly useful for titles like Moon Patrol, which runs at a weird custom refresh rate.
• Consider getting an iPad cover that supports portrait mode. It’s incredibly fun to flip the iPad when playing vertical arcade games, switching into horizontal orientation and making full use of the display.
• As of this writing, iPadOS 26.1 has effectively taken the Home button on my PS4 controller hostage. For the Quick Menu, I’ve had to remap to a different button—R3, for example. It’s not the most comfortable solution, but it works for now. Hopefully, future updates will restore proper Home button functionality in RetroArch.

All in all, this has been a thoroughly convincing gaming experience, and I’m looking forward to gaining further insights—which I’ll be sure to share with you.

News Nr 5 - Negatron for Silicon Macs may arrive.

That's a fully functional Negatron MAME frontend on my Silicon Mac!

With QMC2 development having completely ended, it’s encouraging to see some progress with Negatron, which looks like the perfect successor to QMC2. At the moment, however, the current Negatron download suffers from significant code‑signing issues, meaning the app will only launch if you start the binary directly from within the app bundle. If you’re willing to take that route, you can already enjoy a highly performant Negatron experience on your Apple Silicon Mac.

I updated the main Negatron blog post from 2020 with the news - here it is.

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That’s quite a lot of news packed into a single post—did I miss anything? Let’s see if there are more updates worth mentioning.