For instance, Nintendo have been known to email websites that host archives containing thousands of NES ROM images. There is a thorny issue with regard to downloading the ROM images themselves. The steps described here are essentially the same for every emulator, and they all use the same principles. In some cases the emulator will allow you to connect a USB joypad to provide an even more accurate recreation of playing the console. To play the game, you can use the keyboard, with the joypad layout of the emulated console mapped to the keys. From within the emulator, you locate and load 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 enable playing an old video game on your Mac you need two elements, emulation software and a ROM image file of a specific game. There are other more convoluted methods that I will mention here and will discuss in more detail later. In this series I will focus on emulation software that was built to run in Mac OS X, as this is the easiest and most efficient way of playing old games on a Mac.

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. “The Mac has no games!” your PC owning friends exclaims with an expression of cutting ridicule. This one will serve as an introduction to the wonderful world of console emulation on the Macintosh. 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.ĭue to the sprawling complexity of the emulation scene, I will deal with every aspect of it across a series of articles.

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. 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.

Mac nintendo emulator games