SDLMAME works great (assuming you settle on a front end), is up to date, and has a ton of nice features. I'm told it doesn't play well with Lion, but then again, Lion sucks. But it was a very nice project while still around. MAMEOSX is also dead, and also has quirks, mostly related to recognizing multiple USB controllers (I still can't get it to recognize the spinner on my CP, for instance). Since MacMAME predates Intel code, it won't work at all under Lion, unfortunately. The OS9 version is still a great emulator for classic games, particularly vector games. Still usable, but it has quirks, and it's obviously long out of date in terms of MAME versions, so a lot of MAME features aren't available (i.e., overlays and backgrounds, many video controls, etc.). MacMAME is indeed dead, which is a shame, as it had the most Mac-like and intuitive front end. I've had an OS X (Hackintosh) cab up and running for the better part of a year now, and used a Mac Mini at my TV for MAME-ing for over a year before that.

Every emulator has both decent gamepad AND keyboard (read iPac) support (Most PC emu's have crappy Keyboard settings), perfect scaling/overlay/syncing options for video (all banister apps share the same settings/options for this).Ĭonclusion: the Mac experience is not very up to date (playstation 2/wii emulating anyone?), but it is best in ease of use on any platform. They are sometimes a little behind compared to compatibility and speed of PC version, but Mr Banister (the guy who ported more emulators to mac than anyone else) is king of GUI for emulators:Ĭompared to PC emulators, the mac counterparts are heaven in usability terms. SDL Mess is very good up to date and includes the latest MAME developments. They only skip many versions, so 0.124 is the most recent. Mame OSX is a Intel/PPC modern Mame implemention. Shame he did not receive enough donations to consider the project worthy to debug and add U360 support and stuff like that. It's so easy, it makes me sick of Windows FE's and crying that the guy stopped the project

Mac os x emulator mame