Play 1980's video games using MacMame

Aug 15, '01 12:36:53AM

Contributed by: robg

For those that didn't know it, MacMame (a universal arcade game emulator that can run 2,500 games!) has been carbonized for a while now. There's a new release (download 0.53) out now, and it runs quite nicely in OS X. At left is a quick snapshot of Galaga running on MacMame on OS X -- here's a larger version if you'd like a clearer view.

I ran into a couple of minor visual glitches with a few games, but they are generally quite minor and most games ran perfectly. MacMame provides a large number of options for configuring the video, and it's usually possible to find a setting that looks good and performs well. UPDATE: The 0.53 version (released 8/15/01) seems to fix most of the video glitches I was having. The games now look perfect!

Performance on my G4/733 was (expectedly) fine, even without telling MacMame to hog the CPU. One of the nice things about older arcade games, though, is that they don't require huge amounts of horsepower. MacMame also ran very nicely on our iBook 500.

MacMame relies on original ROM files for the arcade games that it plays. Follow the links on the MacMame web site as a good starting point. From a legal perspective, you should own a full-size arcade version of any ROM you download, as they are still technically not in the public domain.

NOTE: Make sure you also download the new OpenGL plug-in for OS X (and OS 9). It's in the downloads section of the MacMame site, and it lets you apply OpenGL effects (bilinear filtering to smooth the jaggies) to MacMame's games.

If you grew up playing the video games of the 1980's, MacMame is a must-have OS X application!

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