

Some emulation systems can handle more than one console, but some are individualized. This is what allows us to easily play retro games on macOS. An NES imitates the hardware and software attributes of a Nintendo Entertainment System, hiding your Mac’s hardware under a layer of emulation. An emulator tricks the games, or read-only modules (ROMs), into thinking the software is running on genuine hardware. If you want to play PS1 games, you’ll need a PS1 emulator, and so on. If you want to play NES games, for example, you’ll need an NES emulator. Get a Console EmulatorĮmulating a game requires two parts: the ROM, which contains the game data, and the emulator, which acts as the console system. With the instructions below, you can play retro games on macOS from NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, and a ton more.

An emulator imitates a console gaming system, allowing you to play console games on your Mac. I’m happy that I fiddled with the NPM package though, because I found a little piece of information that pointed me to an eventual solution.You can play retro games on macOS with an emulator. Of course I found out that writing software like this is not simple, especially for me because I haven’t written anything like it since college. I spent an hour fiddling with them, after first discovering the best way to build the NPM package in this Stack Overflow answer. There are a whole bunch of methods documented on the readme page. I started with a pretty obvious one called USB. Sad face.īefore I lost all hope, I thought “hey maybe I can write my own software for this guy.” So I fiddled with some Node.js packages I found on NPM. One of them was USB Overdrive, which worked for a few minutes, but it stopped recognizing the controller the second time I plugged it in. I found some more software for joysticks that also failed to work. They only have Windows OS drivers, nothing for Mac users. Screenshot of the Hori driver install page.
