Still, sometimes it’s fun to look back and play some retro console classics and if one desires, it’s perfectly possible to use your Mac to achieve this, with NES, SNES and even N64 games all attainable with good graphic and speed performance. Read on after the break to see how.

ROMS

Since we’re going to be emulating games on our Macs, there’ll be no need for cartridges, nor any way to use them if we had them. Therefore, one must attain ROMS, or files which contain the games. The legality of this is somewhat questionable and opinions vary as to it being piracy or not but most consider emulation fairly harmless. A quick internet search for “the old computer” will usually throw up a website which contains the required results.

1. NES

The Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US in the mid-1980′s and proved to be an iconic 8-bit classic, with worldwide success and many unofficial clones launched in Soviet Eastern Europe. To emulate NES games, we have a few choices in Mac OS X, but after trying most of them out, I’m going recommend you go with Nestopia.

Simply follow the link and navigate to the relevant Mac OS X download to install Nestopia – it’s a free download. That done, you can grab your ROMS and direct the app toward them via the built-in menu.

2. SNES

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the 16 bit follow-up to the NES and was no less successful than its predecessor. With such classic titles as Starfox, Super Mario World and Pilot Wings all finding a home on the SNES, there’s little wonder that its games are still being played today.

To get started playing SNES games on our Mac, we need to grab a copy of SNES9X, which is also free. Download and install SNES9X as normal and then launch the app.

SNES9X contains more options but is still very simple to configure and all you should need to do is navigate the menu to “File -> Open ROM Image” and select your ROM.

3. Nintendo 64

Coming a decade later than Nintendo’s original 8 bit console, the Nintendo 64 was, appropriately, 64 bit and featured significant graphical improvements over its predecessors. For this reason, it takes a little more resources to emulate Nintendo 64 adequately but there’s still plenty of games which run just fine on a Mac.

For our N64 emulation, I’m going to recommend Sixtyforce which has managed to handle the games I’ve tested on my MacBook Pro without many glitches. Sixtyforce is free to use but there is a charge to unlock all the app’s functionality. ROMS are loaded in the same way as SNES9X and Nestopia, accessible via a menu.

Conclusion

The process of running emulated retro games on your Mac really isn’t too difficult at all and probably the biggest challenge is sourcing all the game ROMS you wish to play. If desired, a joypad can be plugged into your Mac to complete the experience. In addition, there’s even an app which turns your iPhone into a NES style controller – I’ve tested this out and found it to be surprisingly usable.

Before we begin, it’s important to note one thing right up front – many console manufacturers do not look kindly on emulation, and some emulators require proprietary software (like the game system BIOS) in order to run. Because of the legal grey area occupied by some of this software, there may be some files or programs for which MTE cannot provide links, such as the actual game files (commonly called ROMS).

NES – GFCEU

We’ll begin with the system that brought video games into many of our homes for the first time, the Nintendo Entertainment System. NES emulators are often the easiest to find, install, and run. In my searching for quality NES emulators for Linux, I’ve found GFCEU to be my favorite.

Installation – It’s available in the standard Ubuntu repositories, so it can be installed easily with apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic, or with the command below:

sudo apt-get install gfceu

It is a graphical frontend for the console-based NES emulator FCEU, so if your distro does not have GFCEU in the standard repositories, look for FCEU to get the same capability.

SNES – SNES9Express

We’ve covered the ZSNES emulator before, so this time we’ll check out my personal favorite, SNES9Express. Like GFCEU above, this is a graphical frontend to a console emulator, in this case SNES9X.

Installation - Like the NES emulators above, both the graphical frontend (SNES9Express) and the emulator itself (SNES9X) are available in Ubuntu’s repositories, so they can be installed easily with apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic like most other software.

Genesis – Gens/GS

Gens/GS is a fork of the popular Gens Genesis emulator. Its goal is to combine the various forks of Gens into one clean, functional program. It can support a wide variety of games and runs on both Linux and Windows, but unfortunately does not (yet) fully support 64 bit processors.

Image by SonicRetro

Installation - You can download Gens/GS for Ubuntu (32 bit only) and Windows here.

Playstation – pSX

Since we’ve covered pSX in detail before in this article, I wont go into a lot of detail here. pSX allows you to play many original Playstation games from your Linux PC. It does, however, have the same drawback as Gens/GS in that it does not currently support 64 bit environments.

Installation - covered in detail here.

Dreamcast – LXDream

Running Dreamcast games on PC requires a fairly fast machine. My Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics wasn’t quite up to the task, so LXDream only gets about 20% native speed for me. On the plus side, 64 bit CPUs are fully supported. You will need the Dreamcast system BIOS to run any games, and that’s one of those files you’ll have to find on your own.

The only problem I had with LXDream was that it didn’t have any controls configured by default. Fortunately, setting up the keyboard is as simple as opening Settings > Controllers and choosing Properties on Sega Controller section.

Installation - Source and binaries for Mac OSX and Linux can be found here. The Debian package installed perfectly on my Ubuntu desktop.

If you know any other high quality console game emulators for Linux, let us know in the comments.

If you want to install some old games or apps or simply want to push the limits on your Windows Mobile device, MS-DOS emulation is a good way to go. Modern Windows Mobile devices are more than capable of running old MS-DOS games and applications, but emulation is a tricky business. Surprisingly there are just two emulators available.

The Emulators

While emulation of games consoles and 8 bit platforms are commonplace on Windows Mobile, there is a huge vacuum in the DOS emulation field, with barely filling the gap. Given that fans of so many classic and retro games want to be able to play their favourites on a mobile platform, it’s astonishing there aren’t more PDA MS-DOS emulators generally, let alone on Windows Mobile.

First of all, there’s pDOSBox – probably the most well known of the MS-DOS emulators for Windows Mobile, pDOSBox is 100% free. PDOSBox (the “p” is for “pocket”) is available as freeware and is currently a beta release for version 2.0 – however it is tricky to setup and not compatible with all Windows Mobile screen resolutions. pDOSBox isn’t suitable for use with all Pocket PC devices and fails to run satisfactorily on Windows Mobile 6.5.

Secondly, there’s Pocket Dos. This MS-DOS emulator is also available for free but requires registration to get rid of an annoying reminder every 15 minutes. The registration is in the $30 area and as there really isn’t very much between the two emulators in terms of performance and compatibility, it’s down to the user’s preference which they opt for.

We’ll carry on now and look how to successfully achieve emulation on each of these applications.

Emulation with pDOSBox

Installation of pDOSBox veers away from the standard CAB file or ActiveSync-managed desktop installation. First download the pDOSBox zip file. Extracted it and copy the folder to the Storage Card on your Windows Mobile device.

While viewing your Windows Mobile device in Explorer (usually opened via ActiveSync) right-click on the file pdbfend.exe in the pDOSBox2.0 folder and select Create Shortcut. Rename this shortcut to pDOSBox 2 and then right-click on this shortcut and select Cut.

Navigate to the Windows folder on your WinMo device, right-click on the “Start Menu” and select Paste

You’re now ready to run pDOSBox!

Configuration of your pDOSBox requires the mounting of your Storage Card as a drive. To do this, browse to the  pDOSBox2.0 folder and open the dosbox.conf file in Notepad.

The following line should be altered as appropriate, depending on how your additional storage is named in the Windows Mobile device and whereabouts you’ve saved your DOS programs.

By default, the line reads:

mount c "/Storage Card/pDOSBox0.63-p1/DosPrograms"

You might change this to:

mount c "/Internal Storage/Games/"

Once this has been done, the C:\ drive should automatically mount when pDOSBox 2.0 is launched and you’ll then be able to carry on and install and launch the games or application using standard MS-DOS syntax:

cd path-to-app-folder
install.bat

Entering the two lines above would – in turn – change directory to the game/app directory and then run the installation procedure.

Once the installation is completed the game could be run by entering:

name-of-game.exe

Although tricky to setup, pDOSBox 2.0 can be an effective MS-DOS emulator and is 100% free.

Emulation with Pocket Dos

Pocket Dos meanwhile is “nagware” (meaning that every so often a notice is displayed asking you to purchase the software) but is easier to setup.

Once downloaded and installed, Pocket Dos can be quickly launched from the Program menu on your Windows Mobile device.

Using the emulator is more straightforward than pDOSBox – Pocket Dos doesn’t require the mounting of new drives, and detects your Storage Card and mounts this as C:\ when the app is launched.

A freeware MS-DOS title – such as Sid Meier’s RailRoad Tycoon as shown here – can be saved to your Storage Card and via Pocket Dos installed and run on your Windows Mobile device.

To do this, load up Pocket Dos and type

DIR
CD Rails
rails.bat (or game.exe)

to play!

Obviously there is a good deal of MS-DOS in this tutorial. It should be noted that the emulation offered by each of these apps goes beyond running old games. Each offers full emulation of the old Microsoft disk operating software, so there are plenty of opportunities to explore the system in full.