Nintendo games on a Mac

http://mattgemmell.com/2013/03/02/playing-nintendo-games-on-a-mac/

by pzaich • 13 years ago

91 53 13 years ago

    Downloading games that you don’t own is definitely 
    illegal, of course, and it hurts the content providers. 
    The only reason that we have games to play is because 
    people pay for them - so please don’t download ROMs of 
    games that you don’t actually own. It’s easy to buy huge 
    packs of second-hand console games on ebay, often with 
    the actual systems included, and it doesn’t cost a lot 
    of money.

This argument always seems a bit weak to me... I don't see how buying second-hand games and consoles is going to benefit the original gamemakers in any way.

Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?

webwielder• 13 years ago

I'd say the economic harm of bootlegging 10+ year old games from large publishers on platforms that are no longer produced is close to zero.

mparlane3• 13 years ago

Actually, Nintendo introduced "Virtual Console" on the Wii system to make money off of these old games you can't buy anymore.

joezydeco3• 13 years ago

Namco is pretty tight about their IP, especially since they now have a tidy little business remaking their old arcade titles again using the original ROMs:

http://www.amazon.com/Namco-Arcade-Party-Cabaret-Cabinet/dp/...

The funny thing is that these titles aren't emulated, per se. They have re-implemented the original hardware (including Z80 core and various sound chips) and distilled it down to an FPGA, playing the code off of the ROMs stored in EEPROMs or Flash memory.

gizmo686• 13 years ago

Downloading ROMs has a clear slippery slope to downloading other games. If you get the games the way the comment describes then their is a built in mechanism to limit how much you can get for free, and with more recent games would leave you much more likely to purchase them.

stonemetal2• 13 years ago

Simple really your average unemployed 12 year old sells their old games to get new ones. Take that away and the market for new games will shrink.

aptwebapps2• 13 years ago

I don't disagree with the economics of what you're saying, but it's interesting that the console makers seem to be against second-hand games:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/03/29/the-coming...

anonymous3• 13 years ago

Or I could download the ROMs and buy some new games, too! And the 12 year old can mow my lawn for tenpence a day until he or she also has enough to buy a new game.

base6982• 13 years ago

Especially given that I've given the original companies thousands of dollars and I'm sure they are buried in storage somewhere.

Garoof• 13 years ago

"Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?"

If we decide that games lose all their value the moment the authors are no longer directly involved, then they're probably going to lose some value when the authors are directly invloved too?

goggles99• 13 years ago

I thought that "obsolete roms" were legal to own via a DCMA exemption.

http://www.zeldauniverse.net/forums/general-gaming/4727-obso...

mpyne4• 13 years ago

DMCA doesn't change copyright. You might be thinking of exceptions to allow you to dump your own ROM, but it would only be legal if you already had a legal copy of the game in question (unless the game is out of copyright).

Millennium• 13 years ago

A secondhand copy is still a copy that the company got its money for.

pudquick2• 13 years ago

Since openemu.org is now just an information-less "coming soon" page, the following links are probably more useful:

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu

and

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/downloads

dmix• 13 years ago

Excellent. Thank you for the links.

mpyne4• 13 years ago

Also to note, the most accurate available SNES emulator is byuu's "bsnes", which is meant to be an archival-quality SNES emulator. Although it looks like now it's called "higan" since it supports more systems than just SNES.

http://www.byuu.org/

byuu• 13 years ago

It doesn't run natively on OS X yet, unless you use one of the ports. Richard Bannister's BSNES, OpenEmu, Mednafen, RetroArch or BizHawk. lsnes might have a Mac port, not sure. I am currently looking for experts in Cocoa to lend a hand, have some tough API limitations I need to work around.

w-ll• 13 years ago

So, I wanted to play some snes9x on my mac mini. It's hooked up to a tv via hdmi; and every time I start/stop a game, it switches the hdmi output and overscans like crazy. I still can't figure out whats going on with it.

Anyone experience similar with hdmi output?

mparlane3• 13 years ago

Please note that the article currently links to the old Dolphin website. We have moved to http://dolphin-emu.org/

Sadly we do not control the old domain. A mistake made long ago. Google indexing is hard to beat! (I'm sorry these sentences do not flow well...)

1337p3372• 13 years ago

Shilling hardware with affiliate links?

prezjordan• 13 years ago

I'll be honest, that's exactly how I saw this article - and I usually keep an open mind to things.

krichman• 13 years ago

This guy seems like a douche. If anyone dares to complain that their mail app is being discontinued (http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/21/entitlement-and-acquisitio...) they get criticised, but making copies and circumventing copy protection on Gamecube and Wii disks is fine.

icebraining• 13 years ago

I don't get your post. Are you saying the two positions are inconsistent? How?

DanBC• 13 years ago

But this is at least the way affiliate links should be done. A nice, clear, easy to understand article with some information.

slashdotdash• 13 years ago

Indicating that these were affiliate links might have been appropriate, nevertheless the article has provided useful content for me. I have a neglected Nintendo 64 collecting dust in my loft. Being able to play the games I own on an emulator using the original controllers would be well worth the cost of the recommended USB adapter. It didn't even occur to me that I might be able to do this before now.

1337p3372• 13 years ago

I was a bit more annoyed that it seems to have been written and submitted just to drive traffic through the affiliate links.

I do agree, though, that the USB adapters are nice. I have a couple of PSX adapters and an SNES adapter. The Japanese console manufacturers seem to do a much better job with input devices than the PC-oriented crowd over here. (Although that could just be personal bias; I did almost all my gaming on consoles and in arcades before the first time I tried plugging something made by Gravis into my MIDI port.)

dbecks• 13 years ago

PSP. The best GameBoy, I've ever had.

base6982• 13 years ago

This was also possible on Pentium 2 233 mhz 15 years ago. The newer games at the time ran badly but classic Nintendo was flawless even then.

apust2• 13 years ago

Unfortunately Conker's Bad Fur Day is unplayable on sixtyforce. ;_;

0x09• 13 years ago

I played through it about a year ago with mupen64plus/wxMupen64Plus (I wish Matt had linked it directly rather than only mentioning openemu.) Everything I've tried works brilliantly except Blast Corps which at least runs well enough with wine/pj64.

links:

http://code.google.com/p/mupen64plus/

https://bitbucket.org/richard42/

https://bitbucket.org/auria/wxmupen64plus *

* two notable bugs: graphics screw up when other windows overlay the view, controller config tends to reset. OpenEmu is probably better in these respects.

apust2• 13 years ago

Amazing... Thank you very much. I appreciate you posting the links.

brunorsini• 13 years ago

I clearly remember that day in 1999 when UltraHLE was released... It was just magic: it played Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time so smoothly I could barely believe my eyes. Graphics were higher-res on my SVGA monitor than they were on my TV, which was connected to a real Nintendo 64. Those games also blew away pretty much anything similar that was native to Windows back then, such magical times

anonymous3• 13 years ago

I don't get this unending praise for Nintendo's d-pad. It's possibly the worst d-pad I've had the pleasure of using - it feels stiff, pressing it diagonally is completely impossible and the sharp edges leave marks on your fingers. Compare this to the playstation's solution - 4 independent easy to press buttons; or Sega and Microsoft's - a nice circle that can be comfortably pressed in all 8 directions.

chc• 13 years ago

I agree with regard to the original NES d-pad. It was an atrocity against thumbs and it could literally cut you. But the more recent d-pads feel much nicer. I never found the circle of the Sega-style d-pad to be much help — I still have always pushed diagonally with the up and right bars, not by pushing the empty space between them. And that was even as a 10-year-old with smallish thumbs.

Also, Nintendo's recent d-pads in particular are so small that your thumb would have to be unbelievably small not to be able to cover both directions comfortably.

anonymous3• 13 years ago

I have a DS and a Wii. Both their D-pads are hard to press diagonally, not because of their size, but due to simple mechanical reasons - they're not made to go diagonally. The cross doesn't fit neatly in the groove when you try to press diagonally.

mpyne4• 13 years ago

The PS* D-pad was pretty bad IMO, the separate buttons made it difficult to smoothly move from one direction to another. Sega's had the opposite problem; it was too easy which made it difficult to press in a given direction reliably without accidentally triggering diagonals.

The SNES was really the sweet spot IMO, every Nintendo D-Pad since (even on GBA) has been way too small.

primitur• 13 years ago

Since I got my Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) I've stopped playing video games on my workstations and laptops, and gotten a lot more productive!

Anyone who wants to revisit their old collections of games and other interesting software needs to investigate this wonderful underrated platform - its truly a neat device and a very rewarding user experience!

watmough• 13 years ago

Yikes! $500 and $600 is a lot for an ARM in a little box. Hardware does appear pretty nice, but for that money...

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

If you buy that dual N64 input thing (and have two such controllers) you can play Goldeneye in the (apparently) little known dual-analogue configuration (holding one controller in each hand by the middle prong).

Nintendo games on a Mac

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