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-engine 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:

  • CrabEmu
    adds support for Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG – 1000
  • Gambatte
    adds support for Game Boy and Game Boy Color
  • Gens/GS
    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

November 15, 2009 – 10:52 pm : Welcome 8static-goers —

Last night I (Dan) did a brief Open Emu workshop at 8static in Philadelphia. For those of you who attended, welcome! After the workshop, I realized I hadn’t said and show enough about what you can do with Open Emu in Quartz Composer, so please check out the videos that show some of what [...]

July 2, 2009 – 3:51 am : OpenEmu filters and graphics progress. —

Here is a short video demonstrating some of the capabilities in a forthcoming release of OpenEmu. Weve removed the oefilterplugin system and now use Quartz Composer compositions to power filters, scaling and effects. Since this compositions are user editable via the free Quartz Composer tool, this allows users to leverage Core Image, OpenGL, GLSL and [...]

June 25, 2009 – 12:53 am : First sparkle update —

I just pushed 1.0.0b4 for the main app onto the sparkle appcast. This fixes an issue that I found that would have prevented all the individual cores from being able to update as well as a few crash bugs that have been reported. As we add appcasts for each core they will all be able [...]

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