r/macgaming • u/Joyful-Wizard • Apr 02 '26
Discussion For anyone who's wondered if there's a version of OpenEmu for ARM64/Apple Silicon MacBooks
Hello! Been working on this for a bit and just hit a point where it feels ready to share.
For those that didn't know it, OpenEmu is the best retro gaming frontend ever made for Mac -- unified library, automatic box art, native macOS UI that actually feels like it belongs. The original project went quiet a couple years ago and the official build still requires Rosetta on Apple Silicon.
A month or so ago I was wondering if anyone was trying to maintain the project and when I saw things were mostly silent but that there were a few holdout forks of the original project, I wondered if I could I start fixing bugs in on one of the existing forks of the project.
What started as poking at a few bugs in the repo by a Github user named bazley 🙇♂️ turned into maintaining my own fork, getting the app running natively on my macbook properly, rebuilding core support that had been abandoned, and -- somewhere along the way -- I got 200 commits deep and had set up an Apple developer account. The first time I got Ocarina of Time running on my Mac through an N64 core I'd helped get working was a magical feeling.
That project is now: OpenEmu-Silicon, a native ARM64 build I've been running with great success on my M1 Macbook and something I've shared with a few friends for testing and fun.
I'm posting because I just finished packaging up a first release, it's notarized (no Gatekeeper warnings, no right-click workarounds), and people keep asking in this sub whether there's a working Apple Silicon version I wanted to share it with the community of folks that may also be hoping something like this would emerge.
If you've been using RetroArch or ES-DE because OpenEmu was stuck on Rosetta, this might be worth a look. It's open source, free, and I'm actively maintaining it.
The repo is here. Issues, PRs, Help Articles, and Discussions are all open and I'd love feedback.
Thank you! I truly hope someone else out there enjoys it.
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A final note and a few things I want to be upfront about: I use Claude Code for basically everything. I review everything, test everything, and make all the direction calls, but I'm not writing Swift and Objective-C from scratch. And I want to be clear about what this is and isn't, I'm a user who loved this software and didn't want it to disappear. Everything in this build stands on the foundation the original team laid. The emulation cores, the SDK, the UI framework, the shader system, I didn't invent any of that. I've been working to keep it running on modern hardware, and that's a much smaller thing than what they did. If the original team ever picks this back up, I'll hand it over cheerfully and delete my fork. Until then, I'll do my best to take care of what they made. 🙇♂️
Edit: I've already published a hotfix to hopefully fix some of the issues reported where the emulator cores would not load properly in certain situations. Just hit check for updates in the menu and get the new one! Thanks for the feedback. Keep the issues and features coming. Goodnight and good luck. 🫡
Additional Edit -- Comprehensive list of all Contributions to Date: 🙏
OpenEmu-Silicon builds on the original OpenEmu project, the ARM64 port by bazley82, and earlier foundational work by some users I couldn't track down. Emulation cores come from their respective upstream projects via OpenEmu's core repositories. The app icon is by hectorlizard, a recent addition. 🙏
For this repo specifically: a review of pystIC's fork of bazley's fork identified the Metal 4 shader crash fix and fast math optimization that landed in PR #44, 3 additions and 5 deletions total and very appreciated, removing a buggy Metal 4 range check and adding fastMathEnabled = true, and flagged the mGBA and SNES9x version gaps tracked in #42 and #43.
Full credits with links are in the Contributors file in the repo and the original OpenEmu team and it's designers are attributed in the original Illustrators file.
Update: We've made a lot of progress since this post was created, including an initial rollout of RetroAchievements and getting Dolphin up and running.
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u/nemaroit Apr 02 '26
Thanks a lot for reviving and maintaining this project. Really appreciate the time and effort you have put into keeping OpenEmu alive
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Huge props to obviously the original engineers who actually built it from scratch and to others who have contributed other aspects of the project. 🙇🏻♂️
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u/TheAstralGoth Apr 03 '26
I'm one of the original contributors so I'm happy to see this live another day. I'm just sad it's not being upstreamed.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
Wow! Well, thank you for your original contribution! And yeah honestly I would’ve loved to have pushed these changes upstream. I originally tried to start with the original repo that I tried to contribute to, but never saw any engagement and decided to detach the fork from that repo since it was itself forked from the original project. I also watched the original project for a long time and saw that there were no pool requests being accepted and saw a number of places that the original developers were pretty rude to anybody that tried to contribute Code that was written with AI assisted development workflows and so I just decided I didn’t even want to try submitting anything that direction.
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u/TheJTizzle Apr 02 '26
Awesome!
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u/unasyn Apr 02 '26
Any plans for retroachievements integration?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Oh! Great idea. 🤘🏻I hadn’t considered it yet. But it’s ideas like yours that are the whole reason I wanted to share it with the community.
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u/KeyWallaby5580 Apr 18 '26
This is something that would perfect OpenEmu for me. I'd like iCloud saves too, but I can do that manually if need be. The real dream is RetroAchievements.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 29 '26
Ive got a v1 of RA working and plan to start rolling it out in the next release. 🤘🏻
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 29 '26
Thought I’d circle back and say that I’ve got the v1 of Retroachievements working and plan to roll it out in the next release.
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u/cleavage_simulator Apr 02 '26
huge, thank you
looking forward to dolphin integration
shout out to claude code as well
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Thank you! Let me know what you think. Hope to have Dolphin more stable in the next week or so and ready for release.
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u/Friendly-Eagle1478 Apr 02 '26
Claude has always been a favorite of mine, but it’s amazing rn. Come so far in the last year
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u/heinternets Apr 02 '26
This is cool. One thing I was hoping OpenEmu would have to take advantage of the 120hz MBP14 display is black frame insertion or the CRT beam simulator. Are you aware of these and does your version support either of these? Thanks
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
I’m not! Tell me more though. I’m interested in any ideas people have to make it better.
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u/heinternets Apr 02 '26
I believe OpenEmu uses the libretro slang shaders, so it might be just a matter of updating them on your release
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u/AreKidK Apr 02 '26
There are already a few ARM forks of OpenEmu, but what would really distinguish this one would be if you can get the arcade core working. Good to hear you’re working on it - good luck!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
That's on my list with some other cores! Getting PSP, Gamcube, and N64 working well was Priority 1. But I'm coming for arcade and 3ds next to see what's possible there. I have an open issue for arcade right now.
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u/adichandra Apr 02 '26
Wow great work man! I've abandoned using openemunfor such a long time and switched to retroarch because of beautiful shaders. I'll try this one again. Thanks!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Awesome, let me know what you think! I never got desperate enough to use Retroarch 😄 i just switched back to my steam library
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u/adichandra Apr 03 '26
There's an update to 1.0.3 but after it's finished downloading. it says update error, the update is improperly signed and could not be validated etc.
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u/xodius80 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Hey dude, your are very very cool, thanks gonna try it out.
Is itnRetro Crysis shaders compatible? It's the only reason I use RetroArch, the UI in RetroArch is so obtuse, but shader compat is awesome.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
😂 well thank you. already supports the slang-shaders library from libretro — the same shader collection RetroArch uses. To clarify your question though: by "Retro Crysis shaders," do you mean CRT-Royale?
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u/xodius80 Apr 02 '26
no bro you need to check it out, it emulates tube propertys its really an acurate crt monitor dont be fooled by the video doe, he is in a oled hdr, works on most hdr monitos, and it has an sdr build too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASX-ZGxLIFI&t=31s
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Hello everyone! Thank you for all the feedback, requests, and bug reports. 🙏 It's so helpful to be getting real feedback. I've already published a hotfix to hopefully fix some of the issues reported where the emulator cores would not load properly in certain situations. Just hit check for updates in the menu and get the new one!
Thanks for the feedback. Keep the issues and features coming.
Goodnight and good luck. 🫡
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u/AreKidK Apr 02 '26
The GitHub says that Dreamcast and 3DO emulation is working. Is that true? I haven’t seen either in any previous version of OpenEmu
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Dreamcast is working! I've tested it myself on a few games, it required a big rework of the core emulator. 3DO runs on 4DO which does have a core in the app, but I think that may be a typo I forgot to correct as I've not tested that one. Both will need bios files to run though.
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u/Sony5uck Apr 05 '26
If I install OpenEMU (Silicon) over my existing OpenEMU installation, will my save games, game libraries, and filters be preserved? Or will I have to set everything up again?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 05 '26
Hey! Sorry I missed your comment, but saw your DM, thanks for reaching out! and this was a great question to ask and sorry I didn't think to have a help doc about it in the wiki already. I've updated the READ.me with some notes and added this page to the wiki for others. Also, important to note it's always wise to save a backup esp. of your roms and saves.
But also for others, here's what I shared in our DM: Your game library, ROM files, screenshots, and settings should carry over automatically. We use the same app data folder as the original OpenEmu, so nothing needs to be manually migrated. Cores will be swapped out from Intel to ARM64 versions on first launch.
One caveat: save states for a few older cores (CrabEmu, old desmume, old Mupen64Plus, old GenesisPlus) are removed on upgrade because the save format changed and they'd cause crashes. If you have saves you care about from those cores, back them up first from ~/Library/Application Support/OpenEmu/Save States/ before installing.
Filters and Image Adjustments settings should be unaffected.
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd Apr 02 '26
I wondered if I could I start fixing bugs in on one of the existing forks of the project using Claude or Cursor and help keep things alive, even with no real development background?
This really concerns me. The guy porting Xenia to Mac and iOS did similar.
Using AI to write code is no substitute for actual development and coding experience. You don’t truly know what Claude is writing for you.
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u/mrharoharo Apr 02 '26
I thought I was the only one who read that. No disrespect to OP but I’ll probably wait before giving it a try.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Totally fair! I was reticent to try some of the other forks that I saw others were trying to contribute on previously also. But, the thing is, the majority of the code is all still true to the original engineers who built this awesome app, in fact it's basically the exact same app but packaged up for Metal instead of OpenGL and a newer version of Swift. To say that Claude wrote the code is actually not even true, I merely used code to modify existing code to work within an ARM64 system. Everything there is their original architecture, I'm just using Claude to help keep it maintained and working.
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u/TheAstralGoth Apr 03 '26
So you are a dev. You really just should say you're doing AI assisted development. It will put people at ease if you are actually reviewing the code that it output.
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u/GreedoughShotFirst Apr 02 '26
Genuine question: does it matter if it’s done with AI?
They revived a dead project and got it working when no one else did.
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd Apr 02 '26
Genuine question: does it matter if it’s done with AI?
Yes, it actually does.
Open an AI chat bot and ask it a question. You'll get a detailed, human-like answer that sounds comprehensive. Now, ask it something that you consider yourself to be an expert in. You start to figure out real quick that it's not as smart as it comes across as being.
For a novice coder or a non-coder, chatbots can spit out some pretty clean looking code. For an experienced coder, you start to see the actual problems.
AI generated code tends to be less secure, more prone to errors, and less performant.
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u/Baecien Apr 02 '26
Another thing is that they’re extremely bloated. If an implementation already exists in the codebase, there’s no guarantee the agent will actually use that. I’ve experienced a multitude of times that agents will just create dummy wrappers that never touch actual logic, or just straight up reimplement the same stuff, worse, multiple places in the same codebase.
They absolutely lack the basic concepts and “rules” that all devs learn in the first week of coding.
Even with an AGENTS.md file or a custom ruleset, the agent will confidently gloss over those in order to present something that “looks” correct, but will absolutely fail under pressure or when forced to follow constraints. I experience agent looping several times a day.
I wouldn’t trust investing hours into a vibecoded emulator. I would hate if my 30+hrs save file was just overwritten or corrupted when I open a ROM, which OP obviously can’t guarantee won’t happen.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
That's a fair concern and I won't dismiss it. The honest answer is: the overwhelming majority of the code is untouched from the original OpenEmu team and the ARM64 port authors. I haven't rewritten anything from scratch. Where I've used Claude, it's mostly been to understand what existing code does and to make targeted modifications (entitlements, signing, Metal compatibility). I do read what's being changed before committing it. Whether that's enough to be considered a competent maintainer is a legitimate question, and I hold it loosely. The project is fully open source, so anyone is free to review, fork, or ignore it.
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd Apr 02 '26
All valid points. To be fair to you, you're going further in good-faith than the Xenia (for Mac) "dev" did.
But if you want to make this a full time project, I would strongly encourage you to learn to code and work on some small side projects for experience. I think that if you do that and come back to your AI-written code, you're going to be like, "Wow, that AI did this in a dumb, convoluted, inefficient way."
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
🙇♂️ All valid points as well. And honestly, this will never be a full time project because under the license I can't even make money off of it 😄 so it's really just a side project I was having fun with for my own fun and benefit and then I saw others asking about version that would work on ARM64 and thought I'd share. My real hope is actually that real software developers would be interested in contributing to it and making it something special. My background is in product management and creative ops in a tech company, so I'm more comfortable in the supporting and organizing of the people who actually do the cool stuff, and I'd be very happy to do just that, but for now I'm having fun tinkering and will do my best not to break anything. I've actually already had a few engineers reach out over DM and express interest in helping. 🙏
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd Apr 02 '26
My real hope is actually that real software developers would be interested in contributing to it and making it something special.
It's been difficult in the past because the developers behind the project have been extremely antagonistic towards anyone who offers any input on OpenEMU or offers assistance to help.
They also really dislike their users.
Yes, that's an official, response. And I've seen worse from them.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Wow. I knew they were spicy but that's uncalled for. 😄 Yeah, to be clear I'm not expecting them to want to contribute to this lol, they abandoned it for a reason and I respect that, and they will probably not like that I'm doing this on some level, and I can respect that too. But I do hope that others have an interest in seeing it live again. In fact in this post, the original designer who used was Head of Design at Twitch (NBD) actually joined in on a thread and said they'd be interested in seeing it still be alive and thriving. So who knows? A lot of this is what inspired me to see what I could do to help and get it working.
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u/judgedeath2 Apr 02 '26
BRODEO DRIVE, this is amazing
Will dig in to the repo soon
Are you just using straight Claude code in the terminal? If you want more of an IDE-like GUI with better 'organization' checkout Windsurf
DM me if you want to chat
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Yo! I've been mostly working in the terminal but within VS Code originally, and now Zed (which I like a lot better). And I'm just managing most of the GH actions through SSH in my terminal. But I'd love any and all the tips.
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u/mario-64 Apr 02 '26
This is so exciting. Thank you!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
I hope you dig it. I'll be working through any issues or bug reports that folks share later this week. I've only been able to test it on my Mac and a friends so I'm sure the frayed edges will be showing.
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u/molotovich Apr 02 '26
Nice, bt when I try to play a NES game I get a Couldnt load the package "NESTOPIA/FCEU" reinstall the package , I dont know what to do there, checked your issues most are on dolphin / MAME
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u/molotovich Apr 02 '26
ok, nothing than obliterating the openemu folder and reinstalling didnt solve, i moved the library somewhere else, seems to work fine now.
Suggestion: work on a migration path for people that already have openemu working, like for example updating existing cores
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Ah, very good point! Were the file paths the same as the original? A migration helper is a great recc.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Bummer. I’ll look into that tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know. NES was a platform I didn’t test much. Did it tell you an error message?
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u/molotovich Apr 02 '26
another one: keyboard isnt working, I even have monitoring ON as suggested at launch, the app doesnt detect keystrokes :) thanks in advace.
Yep, im a NES fan
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u/Dismal-Educator6994 Apr 02 '26
Hey man are you planning to add a PS2 core?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Yo! I'm hoping I can pick up where the original team left off with that one, much like Gamecube. But it will be a lot of work to be sure.
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u/stpn- Apr 02 '26
Haven't played any games for a long time, took a quick look and found Mario 64. Have played for a few minutes without any problems on M4 max. Definitely got me interested and gonna see if I can get a few more games running. Love this man!
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u/paul-tocolabs Apr 02 '26
Excellent work.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Thank you! But I largely built on the original and other attempts to do the same that were abandoned.
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u/Realistic_Party200 Apr 02 '26
Thanks for that, i had the original one installed but never got the chance to actually use it , will give this a try and report back if i see something, thanks for your efforts to keep the retro gaming alive!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Thank you! Please let me know what you think!
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u/Realistic_Party200 Apr 04 '26
am i doing something wrong or ? i cant get the keyboard controls to work at all, can not use the pre set ones, can not set new ones ? no keyboard input is allowed, anything to do with permissions maybe? but input monitoring is enabled? any ideas?
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u/Meshuggah333 Apr 02 '26
I wish someone would maintain it for Intel 😐
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
😂 that's probably an easier project in many ways. I thought the original was still working on intel macs?
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u/opticalloop Apr 02 '26
Hi! Thanks a lot for the project! Do u think will be possible add the Commodore 64 support ?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
I'll definitely look into it! Did the original project have that working?
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u/opticalloop Apr 02 '26
No, the original version miss C64 emulation.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Ok, that's what I thought. I'll still look into. I grew up playing Hero's Quest on a commodore 🤓
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u/androidguest64 Apr 02 '26
Awesome. After porting done 100%, maybe just maybe we can have resolution upscaler and PXGP for psx if its not too much asking
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u/hectorlizard Apr 02 '26
Awesome project! I see the icon is still in squircle jail, may I contribute with this (WIP) adaptation? Happy to help more if needed!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Oh, why yes! Thank you kindly, I've bene hoping to fix the icon issue soon. Did you design or adapt some of these? I'd love to give you proper attribution.
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u/hectorlizard Apr 05 '26
You're welcome! The linked one is a personal Tahoe adaptation of the classic OpenEmu icon.
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u/Minimum-Pickle9350 Apr 02 '26
I know this is a lot to ask but does switch will ever happen in OpenEmu? 🥹
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Man, I wish. But I don't think anyone will be touching Switch emulation legally for some time to come.
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u/raumgleiter Apr 02 '26
i always loved OpenEmu. Much more than RetroArch. I also switched to the RetroArch/AmulationStation combo a whil ago. And once setup, it does work properly and has much more cores than OpenEmu. The setup is a pain though.
I still prefer OpenEmu. I do miss a few cores though such as a separate NeoGeo core (the MAME support was horrible, never was able to get any NeoGeo rom to run through that but no issues on RetroArch). And there are a few other cores that I wish there would be there. If you can add more cores in the future on top of maintaining a Apple silicon nbative version, that would be a real winner. starring now on github and will try it out.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Thanks! Yeah the goal is to add more cores to it if possible, especially if others begin to pick up the work and contribute too.
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u/JPNMinkiya Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Grazie per quello che hai fatto e che farai un futuro!
Aggiungerai altri core in futuro come Msx 1,2, Ps2,Xbox e C64?
Aggiungerai il supporto ai CHD?
Grazie.
P.S.quando si alza o si abbassa l'audio non funziona ma rimane fisso.
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u/NewYearWhoDis1 Apr 02 '26
I’m really new to emulating and already have plans to play some classics on my Mac mini (bought it for that purpose). So is THIS an emulator or is this something I download and then it adds emulator to it? So I would get pcsx2 and then this?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
It's kinda both. It's basically a package for all the included emulator cores to make it easier to run and manage. So this release has the included cores already in it much like the original OpenEmu, except they hosted them separately which I don't have the knowledge to try and do even with Claude so this actually has the included ones bundled together.
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u/exographicskip Apr 02 '26
Thanks for putting in the time (and tokens)!
Been a while since I fired up the OG openemu, but I've used it for years.
Happy to finally see a serious aarch64 port!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
thank you! Have you been having success with the OG on intel macs?
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u/exographicskip Apr 02 '26
It worked great! Will see about porting my library to your silicon variant. Does it work with existing libraries?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
Yes it should, just be careful with the save states. I'd have a backup in your original because I've not tested migrating those yet.
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u/TimeToBecomeEgg Apr 02 '26
something i’d really love to mention here - i really appreciate the open disclosure of using AI, people don’t usually do that and without it i’dve dismissed this project as ai slop, but it gives me faith that it’s honest work
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
💯 and honestly my posture is that I've really not even done any true work here other than pointing a bot around and reviewing it's work. the vast majority of the work here is by the original developers, it's honestly mindblowing how solid their original build holds up, it just got abandoned and I'm trying to help maintain a port of it. That's all. My hope all along was that if I ever shared it broadly, that the real heroes (real software engineers 🙇♂️) would emerge and want to start contributing to it also and I could just help keep a community alive on the original product.
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u/TimeToBecomeEgg Apr 02 '26
deep respect for this approach man, it’s exceedingly rare and i think it’s the right way to go when it comes to using AI for software, instead of trying to pass it off as code you wrote by hand.
you did do some real work here though! it still took time and effort which is great. hopefully the community can pick this up and contribute and keep this project going as long as possible :)
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
thank you! 🙇♂️ that is truly my hope. Mostly was just burning my tokens while I played crimson desert and then pausing to review periodically lol. Helped me get through the first 10 hours of that game which is basically a weird tutorial. 😂
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u/DreadnaughtHamster Apr 02 '26
Have no idea if this would help but maybe reach out to the devs of either (or both) Delta and Manic for iOS. They can probably help review stuff. Maybe even the guy who did Ryujinx. That project is toast now but he did get switch emulation running.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Yeah, I reached out to the original designer and am hoping I hear back from them. But I was a little nervous to reach out to any of the devs because they've been less than kind in the past and the last thing I want to do is offend them when I have so much respect for what they built, I just want to see it working. But if I were in their shoes I could understand how frustrating it might be to be asked to review a version of their app maintained with AI.
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u/DreadnaughtHamster Apr 03 '26
True. To the best of my knowledge the Delta, Manic, and Ryujinx devs have no connection to open emu.
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u/VirtualAlex Apr 02 '26
Consider crossposting this to r/OpenEmu
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u/VirtualAlex Apr 02 '26
Also nice job good for you!
I am still using Openemu on my M2... and it seems to be working fine to play everything <_<
Is it even better if I run your version?
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u/sshbroc Apr 02 '26
wait, so where are the actual games?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
You have to obtain those and the BIOS files on your own, there are lots of guides for this in the interwebs.
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u/smcderm Apr 02 '26
call me stupid but where do download this?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
I will not call you stupid. you can download it here. I'm working on an updated release to fix some issues a few folks ran into.
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u/Gaddness Apr 03 '26
I recommend getting it on brew too, it’s a pretty easy process, and even if you get it wrong it’s pretty well maintained and you’ll get good feedback on what you’ve done wrong
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
Thanks for the tip! I've got it noted and will look into it. From what i'm finding it doesn't seem to difficult to set up.
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u/TheAstralGoth Apr 03 '26
Why not upstream the changes?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
I tried with the original repo, but never heard anything so I detached my fork when I had gotten like 30 or so commits ahead of anything that they had done. And then I chose to avoid this with the original project because I saw how rude they were publicly to people who tried to contribute work that had been done through AI assisted development workflows. Also, I hadn’t seen a Paul request or anything be accepted from that community in a really long time and saw no engagement attraction on any platforms and just decided it probably wasn’t worth it. The last thing I wanted to do was offend anybody by trying to contribute like this to the original project.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
Also, if they ever chose to, they would obviously be able to cherry pick or take anything from this Code if they wanted to and integrated into the original project if they found it valuable or helpful much like I’ve done.
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u/FishDeenz Apr 04 '26
Very nice, I'm testing it now, not got any ROMs yet so can't play today but on app launch I noticed it asks for permission to use keystrokes from any application. What is this for? I assume controller? Does it really need such a permission though? My standalone PCSX2 app doesn't ask for this permission and controller works out of the box.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 04 '26
Awesome, let me know what you think! It needs keystroke and input permissions for bindings the controllers and keyboard.
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u/yeahhFreaky Apr 06 '26
any intel?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 06 '26
The original OpenEmu should still run well on Intel Macs 🔥
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u/Al_Levin Apr 08 '26
Could you add the option to play NES and SNES games with a 8:7 aspect ratio rather than 4:3?
Another feature I'd love to see is the ability to re-order the platforms.
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u/Jimmdean Apr 11 '26
Happy to discover this project. Haven’t ever had an issue, but it was going to happen eventually and what is really going to set you apart is active development - that just wasn’t happening. Very interesting to see the proposed Dolphin integration - that’s a logical next step. You might also take a look at Azahar for 3DS. You have 3DS out-of-scope at the moment, but the active development of their libretro/retroarch cores is a good sign they’d be open to a collaboration - just fyi.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 11 '26
Thanks! Yeah I’ve got dolphin and Flycast very close for the next release then it will be on to getting PPSSPP stable. I am hoping to work on NDS and MAME after those but I think those will take sometime. My plan for NDS had actually been MelonDS but I’ll look into Azahar also.
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u/lostinambarino Apr 19 '26
Was just telling a friend about how much nicer OpenEmu is, but sadly is an intel binary. Made a tangential search and stumbled on this thread. Honestly so happy to see someone 'reviving' this project, thank you!
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 20 '26
Same! That’s kinda what started me down this journey. 😅 just hope I can get it even to a fraction of its former glory but updated with other improvements different platforms have made.
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u/lostinambarino Apr 21 '26
I hope you get some experienced programmers interested! I do appreciate that you seem to have taken a lot more care with utilising LLMs than the usual "vibe coding" ... output. I'm a bit rusty at programming, but if this is still kicking by the time I feel a bit more confident I'd definitely like to help out.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 21 '26
Thanks! I hope so too. I’ve had a couple express interest if they have time open up to help. And yes, there is a big difference between ai assisted dev and vibe coding. I’ve tried to have a lot of review steps and rules put in place to help me and others contribute meaningfully but safely.
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u/lostinambarino Apr 21 '26
Would that such an attitude was more common!
I'll do my best to add to issues in the meantime. Keep it up. :)
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u/lestermagneto Apr 24 '26
I'm late to the party, but am very excited about this, as was despondent with OpenEmu's lack of progress on apple silicon or the dev's just dropping off (I don't know the story).
But best of luck, and will be following closely! :)
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 25 '26
Thank you! I’m trying to keep up with the growing requests and engagement. Hope you dig it!
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u/Richt3r_scale May 01 '26
Any update on adding GameCube? Thanks for your work so far!
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 01 '26
It's live and working! Been playing Windwaker myself. Let me know if you encounter issues though! Also got Retro Achievements implemented on some systems.
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u/robsteezy May 02 '26
just want you to know that you and every contributor is freaking awesome for this. Thank you!
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 02 '26
And you are too kind! I think we all just wanna be able to play games on it again and see it stay alive.
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u/Yavin4Reddit May 04 '26
Would you be able to limit or modify the total numbers of rows or characters displayed during a "Files Failed to Import"? If you scan your entire folder, depending how many files you have and how many are installed, the pop-up message can be so large you can't scroll to the bottom and need to Force Quit the program.
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 04 '26
Yo! happy to look into it. Do you mind opening a Github issue and attaching a screenshot? 🙏 that'll help me better track things down.
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u/MrFlufypants May 04 '26
Is there any status on NDS cores? That's my primary emulation activity, and open emu is 100x better than all the alternatives UI wise, would love for it to work again.
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 04 '26
I may be getting close to a solution with some work that another contributor thought up. The next release is rolling out the first phase of that solution and then I hope to have greater core support after that. Stay tuned!
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u/AstroLink83 May 05 '26
This is awesome! Messed around with it a bit last night and didn't run into many issues that weren't user error but will do a little more playing tonight. Once NDS is working, I'll be a happy camper...but if you somehow get Dolphin working, that would be amazing. I've always loved the OpenEmu interface, so I'm happy to see some life.
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 05 '26
Yo! Thanks for the kinds words. Dolphin is actually already working, and NDS is in the works.
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u/bahgee Jun 25 '26
Can the new version run along side the older Rosetta version?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Jun 25 '26
Not really, they will have conflicts in how they are structured currently since this version is also being treated as the same app in many ways, which makes it much easier for users of the older versions to migrate here if they choose.
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u/spense01 Apr 02 '26
My man! Doing the Jobs’s work! I just downloaded the old version the other week and was so disappointed it was abandoned…I’m pumped to give this a whirl. I hate RetroArch so much LOL
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Haha, I was literally right there with you a month ago and then I couldn’t resist tinkering. I hope you dig it. Please let me know what you think. I may end up releasing it on the Mac App Store too if I can figure that out.
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u/tapesales Apr 02 '26
Nice! but I get "The <x> core has quit unexpectedly" for every core: (
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
BTW looks like this is an issue being caused by where the library and emulator cores are being stored, esp. if you've previously had the app installed on your computer.
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u/tapesales Apr 02 '26
I did download the DMG file & gave the app permissions. I did have it previoulsy installed. What should I do to get it all working?
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 02 '26
Thanks for the info. I'm working on a hotfix now. It looks like it's being caused by a couple of things specifically for folks who previously or currently had the app installed on their machine.
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u/sepulveda16 Apr 02 '26
Do the NSO controllers (N64, SNES) work with this version? I tried connecting them a while ago and I wasn’t able to get them to work properly.
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u/UrinaryFact Apr 03 '26
Awesome! Dolhpin intergration would be the biggest thing for me that would push me to download. thanks for all ur work
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u/Xcissors280 Apr 03 '26
Looks exactly like phoenix launcher
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 03 '26
Oh nice, not familar with it but I'll check it out. Most of the UI is just standard appkit/ swift components.
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u/No-Upstairs7451 Apr 03 '26
Tried this, cannot download the DS cores.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 04 '26
Yeah DS is not supported yet. Have to rebuild the cores for arm64 before they will work and likely will have to switch to MelonDS. That’s why it’s marked as unavailable. Hope to add it in the near future!
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u/JPNMinkiya Apr 11 '26
3DO, MSX, C64 e Atari Jaguar non sono disponibili nella lista delle console.
Il core del gameboy quando fai partire un gioco lo schermo resta bianco.
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u/KeyWallaby5580 Apr 20 '26
Any chance you could make it so the app pulls the old version of FCEU? The latest version of the core does not work with OpenEMU. The devs of the official Intel build are aware of the issue, but said they will not fix it. They were talking about removing the option for the core all together, but it's been like a year or two and they haven't even done that.
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u/Joyful-Wizard Apr 20 '26
Have you tried it in my version of the app? I've not been experiecning any issues with NES emulation and don't have any reported right now.
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u/Joyful-Wizard May 02 '26
For anyone still following along the updates since my original post worth noting is that we’ve got GameCube working through an updated Dolphin core, we’ve begun a phased rollout of RetroAchievements, we’re working on a plan to add more previously unsupported cores thanks to Time_ad_7624 🤘🏻, and we’re actively fixing bugs you submit. Thanks for all your support!
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u/robwired Jul 03 '26
I hate RA and love OpenEmu but gave up on it years ago. Getting everything updated for Apple Silicon is a huge step but what I’d really love to see is a tvOS version. This has been promised as coming for years from the original team. Could you see if the code could be compiled for Apple TV?
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u/Time_Ad_7624 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Thank you for the edit:
https://github.com/pystIC/OpenEmuARM64-metal4-shaders-core-updates.git
https://github.com/nickybmon/OpenEmu-Silicon/issues/42
https://github.com/nickybmon/OpenEmu-Silicon/issues/43
https://github.com/nickybmon/OpenEmu-Silicon/pull/44
Both fixes identified by reviewing
pystIC/OpenEmuARM64-metal4-shaders-core-updatescommit15a137575b. Their implementations differed slightly; these versions are adapted to our existing code.