There are a number of emulators for old video games systems that can be loaded on a mac mini. I've heard you can get a special cord and hook the mac mini up to a television. Then you just need two usb controllers to plug into it to use to play the games. I'm looking for a good NES/SNES/SEGA/Whatever emulator for OS X. I have an old Mac Mini that I'd love to turn into an intro-video game system for my 4 year old son. If anyone knows of a nice USB controller that would be helpful as well. When Nintendo announced last week that it will, gamers split into two camps: people intrigued by the promise of, and others — — who expect Nintendo to release shallow mobile minigames, mostly to promote console titles. Nintendo hasn’t actually committed to bringing the Super Mario games people love into the App Store; instead, it’s that won’t require complex controls. The implication is that only Nintendo consoles are capable of playing Nintendo’s console games. I disagree with that. Hp printer drivers for mac sierra. For years, Macs and PCs have been able to run thousands of classic console and arcade games, including Nintendo’s best-known titles, using emulators. These free programs let discontinued, often HDTV-incompatible games play on computers — in many cases, with noticeably better graphics than you remember. Freed from the fuzzy, low-contrast televisions people used to own, classic games can look pixel-sharp on Retina displays, and some emulators actually improve the edges and textures of 3-D objects. Nintendo may not want you to play its prior console games on your favorite Apple device’s screen, but thanks to emulators, it’s possible today. The picture above? That’s, running on a Retina MacBook Pro Although an incredible amount of hard work went into developing emulators, the basic concept is simple: the emulator converts old game “ROMs” (cartridges/chips) or “ISOs” (discs) into apps that run on another, newer machine. Think of the emulator as being a realtime translator of Spanish into English, constantly translating the old game’s language into the new machine’s language, and you’ll get a sense of how much opportunity there is for show-stopping misinterpretations (game crashes). Yet emulators work: the faster the new machine is, and the better the emulator’s written, the smoother old games run. The best-known classic game emulator is, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which has been available (and evolving) since 1997. Thanks to 18 years of development, MAME is now capable of emulating thousands of different games across dozens of different arcade platforms — equivalent to translating classic books from the world’s most popular languages into English. Developers have released versions of,, and even, and as computer chips have continued to improve every year, games that were once sluggish have become easier to emulate quickly. MAME’s developers also continue to remove bugs, so everything from simple 2-D arcade classics like Pac-Man to thrilling 3-D racing games like Daytona USA (above) can run equally well. On the console side, compiles and provides a slick interface for numerous console emulators. It’s currently available in an with support for seven older Nintendo systems: Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES (with the Japan-only Famicom Disk System), Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Super NES, and Virtual Boy. Many classic Nintendo games run perfectly, including Pilotwings 64 for the Nintendo 64 (above). But all of these emulators face a legality problem: you need to own a game if you’re going to emulate it legally, and very few people actually own the games they want to play. (Collecting console games can take up a fair amount of space, but arcade collections are in an entirely different league.) That’s the key reason Apple has rejected MAME and other game emulators whenever developers try to sneak them into the App Store. ![]() In 2013,, surviving for a month before Apple yanked it. Late last year, “Floppy Cloud,” an iOS emulator of Nintendo NES and Super NES games (shown playing Super Street Fighter II, above), snuck into the App Store for two days before getting bounced out by Apple. For those of us who own classic games that will only play on aging consoles (and out-of-date TVs), emulators are a godsend. They keep (such as the still-fantastic futuristic racing game for Nintendo’s GameCube) alive without forcing customers to pay a second (third, or fourth) time to run the same game on new consoles. Nintendo has made a small fortune by releasing the same exact game in incompatible formats for different consoles, charging fans separately for each machine they want to play it on. Like the App Store, which lets you run games and apps on past, present, and future iOS devices, emulators cut through that nonsense. Nintendo be heading in the same direction, itself. The big change over the last five years has been a radical increase in the amount of power found in new Apple devices. For instance, Apple says that the iPad Air 2’s A8X CPU is 12 times faster than the A4 inside 2010’s original iPad, with graphics processing that’s 180 times faster. Even though Macs haven’t jumped as dramatically in performance, I was astonished to learn how well emulators are running these days on even low-end and midrange Macs. Equipped with only Intel HD Graphics chips, two-year-old MacBook Pros and Mac minis are capable of running Nintendo GameCube and Wii games at full speed under emulation.
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