Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Intel Mac Emulators?
So we've been using the Mac Mini as our living room PC for awhile now. I gotta say, it's the best and most expensive DVD player we'll probably ever own. However, as a living room PC it isn't really living up to the Ubuntu box it replaced. This is mainly due to the lack of emulators for old consoles. I mean, what good is a living room PC that won't play Mario?
Now, I have been able to find an SNES emulator, the classic SNES9x. It's a universal binary, it works, it supports full screen and it supports USB gamepads. ZSNES is just as good, but it keeps freezing up. But for every other console, genesis, NES, atari, etc. I have come up empty handed. Every emulator I found doesn't support gamepads and full screen, it isn't free or it isn't compiled for Intel.
The worst are all these emulators like NEStopia which require emulator enhancer. Emulator enhancer is this $25 shareware program that adds fullscreen and gamepad features to existing emulators. wtf? Every emulator for Linux and Windows supports gamepads and full screen just fine. How come for the Mac you have to buy a $25 shareware to get features which are free on every other platform?
I know there are Mac users out there. Are there decent emulators out there for the old consoles, besides SNES, or are we SOL?
Now, I have been able to find an SNES emulator, the classic SNES9x. It's a universal binary, it works, it supports full screen and it supports USB gamepads. ZSNES is just as good, but it keeps freezing up. But for every other console, genesis, NES, atari, etc. I have come up empty handed. Every emulator I found doesn't support gamepads and full screen, it isn't free or it isn't compiled for Intel.
The worst are all these emulators like NEStopia which require emulator enhancer. Emulator enhancer is this $25 shareware program that adds fullscreen and gamepad features to existing emulators. wtf? Every emulator for Linux and Windows supports gamepads and full screen just fine. How come for the Mac you have to buy a $25 shareware to get features which are free on every other platform?
I know there are Mac users out there. Are there decent emulators out there for the old consoles, besides SNES, or are we SOL?
Comments
Emulation has been pretty-much a given as far as the list of "things Rym uses computers for" since I first ran NESticle on my Pentium 200 back in 1997. For almost a decade, emulators have been easy-to-use freeware. The idea of paying to make an emulator work died when shareware died.
As far as desktop computing is concerned, Macs and Linux are similar in that they have very small userbases. With Linux, however, the majority of these users are very technologically inclined, and many are involved in the OSS movement. With Macs, the opposite is true. Thus, a large percentage of Linux users are actively contributing to their operating environment, while there is no equivalent movement in the Mac community.
Shareware was a flash in the pan for most of the computer world, and was immediately made obsolete by advances in network connectivity that increased competition among software writers. No one would pay for an application if someone else has written the same thing for free, and the increased sharing decreased the amount of redundant effort.
There's also the fact that Macs used, until very recently, a fundamentally different architecture. Writing software for both Windows and Linux is not terribly difficult. Writing that same software also for the Mac involved substantial extra effort for very little return.
There's also the issue of community. I don't think the Mac community as a whole is very aware of the state of the software world. (I know there are exceptions). I'll bet a lot of them don't realize that many of the programs they pay for have free equivalents. They see a program that "makes their gamepad work with their emulator" and gladly fork over $25, not knowing that every other emulator in the world needs no such third-party extension to function.
Scott handled all of the emulation on the old div, so I don't recall what we used.
System wise, we'd want to emulate the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Gear, and Game Boy at minimum. I had working emulators for all of these back in the day. Additionally, it would be nice to have SegaCD, N64, Dreamcast, and PS1/2, but I never really attempted to emulate them in the past.
I disagree with the lack of development going on in the Mac community though. I've found plenty of great freeware apps for my Mac (see here or here). It's probably true that the relative size of devs to users on the Mac is considerably smaller than for Linux (where most users are devs), but I've found that the quality of the software available for the Mac trumps that available for Linux any day. Linux has more, but many are half-baked Sourceforge repositories that are full of bugs and get abandoned from lack of interest. Conversely, the freeware stuff for Mac tends to run nicely and have a polished feel to it. This may simply be due to the SDKs/APIs/Cocoa/Aqua/whatever-its-called available from Apple though, in the same way that VB.NET lets you put together a nice looking Windows app relatively easily. It might also be simply due to the difference in mindsets from the users of the respective systems. Linux users prefer ridiculous power and utility over appearances (ie. grep) and don't mind doing a bunch of setting things up and installing packages to get something that runs like greased lightning, whereas Mac users tend to be content with software that does less, but is easy to use and looks nice (ie. iTunes) and requires one mouse motion to get going. Different strokes, etc, etc.
I'm starting to get the impression that Rym and Scott just aren't well-suited to the Mac lifestyle. Too much Linux, I suppose?
There are plenty of Linux/OSS apps that have wonderful guis and require little to no configuration. There isn't a single one I use that's anywhere near unstable or half-baked. They didn't require any effort on my part other than typing "emerge name-of-application."
The issue here is simply that it seems there are many applications and tools which either don't exist at all on the Mac, or don't exist for free on the Mac. They do exist for Windows/Linux. There's no denying this. Emulation of the classic systems is a solved problem. It's been solved and free for almost a decade. Only on the Mac do you need to pay MONEY to do it.
The Mac is thus unable to do tasks that I, as a computer user, require. Shareware, a business model that died a decade ago, still thrives for the Mac due only to the lack of software development therein.
Now, what exactly is the "Mac lifestyle?" Computers are tools. They are a means, not an end. Saying I live the "Linux lifestyle" is like saying I live the "hammer lifestyle" because I use hammers on occasion.
Re: "lifestyle", that's my bad in poor word usage. What I mean is that Linux users tend to have very different knowledge bases regarding computers than Mac users do, and as such approach software much differently. You know how the guts of your computer work and have things customized accordingly. A Mac user would probably think of the computer as a single entity and expect it all to work right the first time. It makes sense then, that you probably have much different requirements as to what your computer does than a typical Mac user does (or such as I do, when I use my Mac). (Out of curiosity, what do you require from a computer?) You mentioned in a Geeknights episode that you had custom scripts put together to handle all your mp3s and such. Based on that, I'd guess that relenquishing all that control to iTunes and having the software do it all for you might not sit well. I happen to like it, so I switched over to iTunes (dang pity that it runs like a hog on Windows with a large library...).
When I say that you're suited to a Linux lifestyle, I mean that you know intimately what you're doing with a computer, and would rather do things using open-source and free software. I would therefore not recommend that you get a Mac. (I'd say to go to your local computer chop shop and buy a $500 Windows box and set it up the way you like it.) Macs are for people who don't know/care about how the computer works because things tend to just work properly and stay that way (or for people who like the look and feel of the OS like me). That's not to say that what you need can't be done on a Mac, but that it would be easier and more economical to do it on a generic Linux box.
Re: Linux apps requiring configuration, yeah, there are many that are nice that way. Not arguing. What I'm pointing out is that there are reams and REAMS more that aren't. Sourceforge has what, at least 50000 projects on it? How many of those are good, stable programs worth using?
On another side tangent, and musing aloud, it might be meaningful that my Mac is a laptop and I have a Windows desktop box to complement it (albeit one with a busted-ass power supply >:x ) and I spread my computer requirements between the two. For most things, I use my Mac, but for other stuff like copying DVDs or gaming, I use my Windows box. I don't need my Mac be able to do everything I need from a computer, so that probably makes me more lenient when it comes up short.
So I guess after all that, all's I'm saying is that the Mac does not seem to do what you need it to, and so it is probably (definitely in hindsight) not the best thing to spend your moneys on. (Of course, fat lot of good that does now that you bought the thing.)
I'll be sure to remember all of this for when we do our final thoughts episode on the Mac once we've had and used it for long enough to really assess it. You make a number of valid points, and I don't really disagree with most of them.
I just want to address one thing before I use the topicality stick. The custom script does exactly one thing: it encodes the mp3 and makes the id3. It's a three line bash script. It would be almost as fast to type those lines manually, and that script would work with little modification for any mp3 encoder and any id3 writer. As for iTunes, having the software do it all would have sat with me very well and saved me some time. The problem was that iTunes/Garageband can't do it in the first place.
But to go back on topic, we really just want to know what other Mac users use to emulate. We're not trying to prove anything, we just want to recoup at least some of the investment we made into this Mac mini. Playing emulated games was a major reason we build the first Linux-based div, and not being able to do this on the Mac is rather annoying.
Supply and Demand. There are fewer mac users and though a high number of users may be technologically compentant (mac users tend to know more aobut their machines than windows users, not the other way round) there are far fewer mac developers than windows developers. We don't have 15,000 text editors. We have 15. And of those 15 only 5 are worth using. So if you've only got 5 editors to choose from and all of them ask some kind of shareware fee to unlock features then there's not much you can do about that. Hell, even Apple plays the shareware game to a certain extent (Quicktime Pro anyone?).What we're starting to see is new development that is free/OSS but all of those apps are Growl and Quicksilver and so on. The new generation of Mac developers aren't going back to make a free version of a "solved problem". They're out fixing new ones. As time progresses I think the problem of shareware will fade into the background but in the meantime I've got a new version of WeatherPop to download.