In this episode I'd like to show you how to emulate older systems on your Mac and why you should even care. For this video
I'm going to be using an old Mac mini G4 system from 2005
It's only a 1.2 gigahertz model with one gigabyte of RAM
So the reason I'm using such an old computer is I kind of want to drive home the point that you really don't need a
particularly powerful system to do any of the things that I'm about to show you.
Believe it or not, I actually have a fairly large collection of old vintage computers
Unfortunately, they don't all work.
Take this apple IIe for example. The disk drive no longer works. So all I can really do is write programs and basic.
But there's a reason
I haven't bothered to get it repaired that's because I can run all of that software on a modern computer
using a program called Virtual ][
This program is fantastically easy to use. Here I am playing Ultima 4 the Apple 2 version on my Mac.
And here's texture another popular game from the 1980s.
I love using this retro game controller I bought. It looks exactly like the Nintendo controller, but it plugs into USB.
I can use a program called Nestopia to play all of the old Nintendo Games. Here Super Mario Brothers 2.
When played in full-screen mode it's just like the real thing.
Metroid was another popular game for the Nes.
I actually own an old Macintosh plus.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work either. I replaced most of the capacitors on the board and resoldered all of the joints,
but unfortunately, I only get this when I turn the machine on.
Not to fear I can run all of that old software in a great little program called Mini V Mac
You can run it in windowed or full-screen.
Here's simcity — a popular game from the 1980s.
Or how about Space Quest 2?
Of course the king of computers in the 1980s was the Amiga 500 or at least that's how I remember it.
There are some pretty fantastic games you can play using a program called UAE, which stands for Universal Amiga emulator.
Unfortunately this one is sort of a pain to set up and for some reason it runs
very slowly in a window. But it seems to run really fast using full screen. And here's a game everybody should be familiar with — Lemmings.
If this isn't to your taste you could play something like Lotus Turbo Challenge.
It's hard to forget the good old Commodore 64.
On a G3 G4 system
you'd probably want to use power 64. If you have a newer Intel machine you probably want to use VICE or the Versatile Commodore Emulator?
VICE will actually emulate a lot more than a C64. It'll also do the VIC-20, the Commodore Pet, the +4,
the Commodore 128 and more.
One of my favorite games was spy versus spy.
Another popular game was Ghosts and Goblins
So what about another console the Nintendo Gameboy?
For this you'd want Boycott or
Visual Boy Advanced. It can emulate the original game boy Games like Super Mario land.
It can also do color games like Tetris DX.
Of course we can't talk about consoles without mentioning the atari 2600.
For this you need a program called Stella. It's
very user friendly and works really well. Here's Pitfall — a popular game from the early 1980s.
Or if that doesn't suit you, how about Q*bert? The Hold Position?
If you were an IBM PC user of the 1980s, then what you need is DOSBox.
Populous was always one of my favorites. In many ways I consider it to be one of the first realtime strategy games.
About space Quest 3. I really miss these funny graphical adventure games. I'm not sure why they fell out of favor.
I really enjoyed exploring and trying to solve the mysteries.
I'm going to show you one more emulator. This is the Nintendo 64. For this you'll need a program called SixtyForce.
While it works it lags a little bit on the G4 system
I'm using. I'm sure a higher-end G5 or Intel based Mac would work far better.
So you like my Space Invaders shirt?
Seriously though I mean I've showed you a lot of emulators, but I really just kind of scratched the surface.
There are so many more other systems out there that you could emulate, that just I didn't have time to show them all to you and
I have a fairly big collection. Here's another one of my favorites from the 1980s. This is a Tandy model 102.
I always wanted one of these when I was a kid, but I couldn't really afford one because they're like
$1,400 but I bought this one on Ebay for 50 bucks, and you know
this this video is actually a little bit of a test. I wanted to kind of test the market so to speak and
see what gauge what kind of interest there would be and possibly creating another Youtube channel for retro gaming?
I don't know what I would call it just yet,
but I'd basically be showing you all the different games from the 1980s
and showing you what they look like on the Commodor 64,
then Apple 2 in the Mac,
and you know so on and so forth and and and delve a little bit deeper
into how to set up some of these emulators and get them working and and spend a lot more time.
Then just blowing through them like I did in this video.
So I'm going to be kind of gauging the interest over the next few months on this video
see how how many views it gets and
I'll kind of make my decision on whether I want to create another channel for that. I'll keep in mind
I already have several channels a lot of people don't realize that they send me email say well
what are you going to make another video?
Well what they don't realize is I'm making videos all the time, but I currently have five YouTube channels.
They're not really related to each other so you may not necessarily be interested.
I have for example a channel called awesome air guns
where I talk about things do reviews on air gun equipment and show blowing stuff up and stuff like that. A lot of my
computer
followers
you're probably wouldn't be interested in that. I also have a channel on gold and silver and how to do investing and stuff like that.
Probably wouldn't be an interest in most you either.
But I think the retro gaming thing does kind of fit in a little bit with
what I do here on this channel, and so on
I listen to some of your comments, and see if anybody thinks that that would be a good idea
to start another channel on retro gaming and see you see where it goes on that.
So I drop me a line and tell me what you think.