Open Emu – Game emulation for Mac OS X

Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game emulators as plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.

Currently Open Emu can load the following game engines as plugins:

  • BSNES
    adds support for Super Nintendo (SNES)
  • CrabEmu
    adds support for Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG – 1000
  • Gambatte
    adds support for Game Boy and Game Boy Color
  • Genesis Plus
    adds support for Sega Genesis, Sega CD and Sega 32x
  • Nestopia
    adds support for NES/Famicom
  • SNES9x
    adds support for SNES and Super Famicom
  • Visualboy
    adds support for Game Boy Advance

Open Emu also supports high quality scaling with Open GL, multi-threaded video and audio playback as well as individual features and preferences per game engine, such as NTSC video signal emulation for the Nestopia core.

Screenshots

Scaling
Scaling
Plugins
Plugins

Open Emu QC

Open Emu QC leverages the modularity and plugin architecture of Open Emu and brings it to Quartz Composer, Apple’s graphical programming environment. You can now bring your favorite ROMs into Quartz Composer (and any application that supports Quartz Composer documents) allowing you to post-process, add effects and play your ROMs in new and interesting ways.

  • Use audio or MIDI input to drive game characters and input
  • Use the same input signals to control multiple ROMs at once from the same joystick/gamepad
  • Add 3D effects or image processing to the game image for interactive 8bit visuals
  • VJ with your favorite games, in realtime, with effect responding to game input

Open Emu QC includes a separate plugin just for the Nestopia engine, which supports extended features, such as ROM glitching, cheat codes and game rewinding. You can now software ‘bend’ a virtual NES, in realtime, with your favorite Quartz Composer-compatible VJ applications.

Screenshots

Quartz Composer
Quartz Composer
Quartz Composer NES glitching in action
Quartz Composer

News

December 22, 2010 – 3:46 pm : New GitHub repository —

For a variety of reasons, the Open Emu team has moved the source code repository from SourceForge’s SVN to GitHub. What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a developer who wants to help out with Open Emu, this makes it much easier for us to add your changes to the project: just fork [...]

April 16, 2010 – 2:49 am : OpenEmu Progress —

The OpenEmu team has been hard at work on some behind the scenes updates to OpenEmu and we’d like to share our progress with you. Bugfixes, tweaks and full 64 bit support for 10.6 First, we have put together an experimental and much cleaner Open Emu branch in SVN. This version has updated cores with [...]

March 28, 2010 – 4:36 pm : All cores updated —

Last night we pushed out an update for all of the following emulator cores, a bug fix release to restore support for the Quartz Composer plugins. Please note that we have discontinued development on the Gens/GS core and have replaced it with Genesis Plus. If you still have the Gens/GS plugin in your Cores directory, [...]