Arcade emulation and Mac OS has not always been the greatest, and that's because there
hasn't been a great official port of MAME, multi arcade machine emulator.
I hope I said that right because I don't have internet right now to check on that acronym.
That aside, MAME is the main way everyone emulates arcade games
because it supports over 7000 different games and 10,000 different ones if you count
all the variants, so it's absolutely massive, and it's really impressive.
There are two main ways that you can use MAME today. In this tutorial, I'm going to walk through
the two ways to get MAME up and running under Mac OS with a very close to the most recent version of
MAME. I will also, in this video, demonstrate how to run the Apple Silicon version as well.
Quick disclaimer emulation exists in a legally gray area. Please don't ask me for any of the
game files, as those are copyrighted. For all the other software discussed in this video,
check the description as they'll have the links.
Now that we got that out of the way, whether you're in London or Portland,
it's a fantastic day in Oregon. I'm your all-important host,
Greg reppin' DMUG Definitive Mac Upgrade guide always with the best beats and brews on youtube.
First, let's start with the easier route. OpenEMU is a multi-console emulator meaning
that it supports a wide variety of retro game consoles. For those in the know, it's a lot
like RetroArc as it's a core-based emulator, but it's just a lot more pleasant to use.
Let's go to the OpenEMU webpage and download the experimental version. This is key because
this is the version that has MAME. MAME stands for multi-arcade machine emulator, and it's absolutely
massive at this point in time. It supports over 7 000 unique different arcade games and over 10 000
actual romsets, so it's big. If you try and launch the application on Apple Silicon,
you'll probably get this error. Fear not. This is something that we can easily circumvent.
Right-click it and click open now you'll be able to execute the unsigned code.
Next, it will ask for input monitoring permission. This is fine because it needs this for gaming.
Once you are done with granting the permissions is now time to go to the OpenEMU preferences.
Click course locate MAME and then click the gray install text. The cores are actually the
emulators. Many of these can be downloaded and installed as separate applications under Mac OS.
This should not take terribly long to install. Now you're ready to install arcade games.
MAME is a little different than most emulators since it requires specific file names,
and it expects the games to be in zip format, so don't rename the games and don't decompress them.
If, for some reason, the game came in a different format other than dot zip,
you'll need to uncompress the file and then re-zip it. Select arcade from the left-hand side,
and now you're ready to drag your ROMs in.
now you can launch the game as you would in the other game. since these are arcade games,
you'll have to insert coins or change the dip switches, which are settings in the game
in the OpenEMU preferences. You can change all
your input settings now. What's really great here is this uses the latest
version of MAME. MAME games can be kind of tricky because sometimes they have dependencies.
When I try and launch this particular game, you'll notice it gives me an error. The error tells me
what exact zip file I need to download so I can just search this and download it. I drag my
missing file into MAME, and now I can run the game for years OpenEMU used to be stuck on a very old
version from 2013. this meant that it was missing support for a lot of more modern games. The game I
have fired up right now., Virtua Fighter 2 was not supported under the old version of MAME.
MAME also supports Neo Geo games. Installing a Neo Geo game is just about the same process
as installing any other arcade systems game. However, you need one key component because if
you don't, you'll get this error. The error code tells us everything we need to know,
which is that we're missing the neo geo dot zip., this is the Neo Geo's firmware.
Installing the firmware is the same process as installing any arcade game just drag the ROM file
into the library. OpenEMU is not smart enough to filter this file out, so just ignore it.
The new version of MAME seems to be way more particular about the Neo Geo's firmware. That
means most firmware you download probably won't work with it. It took me quite a while to track
down the proper version that works with the newest MAMEOncece you have the correct version of the Neo
Geo firmware, you can launch games, and there are a lot of classic games for the neo geo as well.
OpenEMU is not Apple Silicon native, but it runs fine. OpenEMU does not always have the latest
version of the MAME core, at least historically speaking. That seems to have changed but is still
not Apple Silicon native, so if you'd like to run the Apple Silicon native version or the
latest version on Intel x86, you need to get SDL MAME. SDL MAME's front end is not as pretty as the
presentation of OpenEMU, so it's gonna look a little rough to some people, but it works great.
First, you need to download SDL2 from libsdl.org. SDL2 is a library for cross-platform
development designed to provide low-level access to hardware such as I/O and graphics
cards. Many steam games are based on this library when they're ported to Mac OS.
After you have downloaded the SDL2 framework, you need to install it into library frameworks.
Now it's time to download SDL MAME. I'm going to download the
Apple Silicon version as I'm on my m1 right now.
If you're on an Intel Mac, download the Intel version.
This application is actually a command line run application. First,
we are going to right-click open the main executable to whitelist it for Mac OS Big Sur.
The program will fail to execute, which is fine,
so you can ignore this or close this terminal window.
Next, we're going to open up the ac os terminal. For my terminal savvy users,
you can tune out just for a second, but for my non-terminal users, first, we're going to type
cd followed by a space aka change directory.
This is the command that will allow you to navigate to a different folder
on your computer. Then we will drag the folder that contains SDL MAME onto the
terminal window. Then hit return to enter the command. All this does is save us time from
trying to manually type out where this is on our computer. Now that we're in the correct folder,
we can execute MAME, so type ./mame, and we will see this not very beautiful UI.
By default, it hasn't filtered out what games we have. It looks like we have games already
installed, but we do not. You can use your mouse with the UI and check availability.
As you can see, I don't have any ROMs installed, so it's time to install some
ROMs to exit the program. Hit escape. I'm going to use the same ROMs that I was using in OpenEMU
and move them into SDL MAME. As expected, they go into the ROMs folder. Now it's time to launch the
application yet again. Now I have some ROMs listed. I'll double-click one to play one,
just like OpenEMU, I had to install the relevant dependencies, In this case, the Neo Geo firmware.
In order to run this title since it is a neo geo game now that I'm here, I don't know the controls
for this thing, so I'm just banging on some keys. Fortunately, you can configure this using the UI
click configure options. Configuring the controls is a matter of using device mapping and,
of course, the general inputs. Hopefully, this is enough to get you started with SDL MAME.
I don't know the current trajectory for OpenEMU. Maybe they'll keep their core up to date,
which would be awesome, but if not, you can always use this version. As of recording this
SDL MAME, and OpenEMU are both using the current version of MAME that was released in August 2021.
Even if OpenEMU isn't running the latest and greatest MAME,
this is a significant upgrade from what we had before.
Most users won't be that concerned about what version of main they're running.
Hell, even I'm not that concerned about MAME updates, of course,
including bug fixes and also expanded support for new chipsets and games,
considering MAME is almost 25 years old now. Most of the big titles that you're probably thinking
of are supported now that I covered the basics. I think this is a good place to wrap this video up;
I'm sure there's another way of running MAME under Mac OS that I'm not aware of,
but these are the two methods I've used for years. I hope you found this video useful.
Thanks for watching