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kinless

macrumors regular
Apr 2, 2003
189
285
Tustin, California
Isn't this illegal?! I thought Nintendo only licenses their games to run on their hardware.

The emulator itself isn't illegal. But all the ROMs downloaded off the internet probably are, even if you own the game. The only way to get around that is to buy a device that extracts a "backup" of the ROM image off your old cartridges you already own. (Of course, who wants to spend time/money doing that?)

In other news, this is just another reason to finally ditch 10.6.8. Going to upgrade to Mavericks on a new SSD at the end of this month anyway. Hoping my 2008 Mac Pro won't choke on it...
 
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212rikanmofo

macrumors 68000
Jan 31, 2003
1,836
691
This is awesome, love the clean sexy mac like UI! Now this is what you call an emulator!

Question, if i plug in a usb playstation 3 or xbox 360 controller into my mac, will I be able to use it to play games with?
 

daveofiveo

macrumors newbie
Jan 11, 2013
25
6
Awesome

This is great. I am still trying to figure out how to pair my Wiimote.

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This is awesome, love the clean sexy mac like UI! Now this is what you call an emulator!

Question, if i plug in a usb playstation 3 or xbox 360 controller into my mac, will I be able to use it to play games with?

Theoretically yes.
 

Twimfy

macrumors 6502a
Sep 11, 2011
888
246
UK
Have been running the Beta for a long time now. Was starting to worry that this was going to disappear into vapourware for the public.

Pleased it hasn't as it's a really nice piece of software.
 

bbeagle

macrumors 68040
Oct 19, 2010
3,541
2,981
Buffalo, NY
How do they not get sued?

An EMULATOR is legal. They can't be sued for that.

However, the GAMES themselves can't be distributed by the same company. They 'assume' that you bought the game yourself and converted it to a ROM image, or got these ROM images from a legal source.

Of course there really are no 'legal' sources. You still can be legal, however - you could have bought the old Nintendo games, and have them stored in your attic, and just downloaded those same ROMs. That's the 'innocent idea' that the emulator makers are 'assuming'.

Somewhere, in some FAQ, or buried somewhere will be a link (or a hint on what to search for) to find these ROM images.
 

coolfactor

macrumors 604
Jul 29, 2002
7,057
9,727
Vancouver, BC
Not only does that app look delicious, so does the website! Wow, they have a fantastically-skilled and very passionate crew that cares about the pixel-level detail. I was almost starting to miss those days of great Mac devs setting the bar really high.
 

Dookieman

macrumors 6502
Oct 12, 2009
390
67
Some of these questions asked remind of emulator discussions from the late 90s....

"You must delete this game within 24 hours or it's illegal!"
 

jasonefmonk

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2011
385
431
I compiled a beta version a while back and it worked great. It didn't take much to play Pokémon FireRed with a Wii remote, on my TV via AirPlay.
 

cynikal

macrumors member
Aug 12, 2003
69
0
I seem to remember a while ago when i was fiddling with EMU's a year back (either nestopia snes9x or znes i think) you needed a special .sys file for being able to use the emulator (not the video game .rom itself).. don't remember exactly what the purpose of the extra system file needed was (again it wasn't specific to the games' cartridge image) but i know you couldn't use the emulator with any video game unless you found it itself. all i know is they wouldn't distribute the emulator w/ the file so you needed to find it on your own since they weren't licensed to distribute that portion of the emulation functionality (then you'd have to find the video game file images as well)

i am wondering if/what they did to get around that, or if it isn't applicable with OpenEmu..
 

RVijay007

macrumors member
Jul 20, 2010
94
39
Downloaded it, put the Legend of Zelda ROM on it, ran perfectly on my Mac Pro 3,1. Connected a Wiimote over bluetooth (super easy process in the app), and then used AirParrot to airplay it to my Apple TV 3 in the other room. Wiimote bluetooth still works from this far away, and it's like having all the video game consoles at your disposal in one place.
 

gorskiegangsta

macrumors 65816
Mar 13, 2011
1,281
87
Brooklyn, NY
Crashes on launch for me.:mad: Don't know why, as the beta version I replaced it with worked just fine.

EDIT: Nvm, looks like control+open (allow app from unidentified developer) worked. For some reason the warning didn't come up as it usually does.
 
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Lone Deranger

macrumors 68000
Apr 23, 2006
1,895
2,138
Tokyo, Japan
Oh man, this is awesome! This is pure gaming! :D
 

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zorinlynx

macrumors G3
May 31, 2007
8,169
17,687
Florida, USA
This is awesome. After years of dealing with half-baked emulators on the OS X platform, finally something that just works, out of the box, without having to download shareware "emulator enhancers" to use USB game controllers and so on.

Kudos to the dev team for this, keep up the great work.
 

ArtOfWarfare

macrumors G3
Nov 26, 2007
9,560
6,059
Isn't this illegal?! I thought Nintendo only licenses their games to run on their hardware.

Distributing ROMs is generally illegal, as you're pirating software (it varies. Some companies have released ROMs for old games, for example.) Making an emulator capable of running them, on the other hand, isn't illegal. All you're doing is making a program capable of reading a file, and accurately reproducing what a console does with the contents.
 

hkenneth

macrumors regular
Jul 25, 2011
245
23
[/COLOR]
Anybody got good recommendations for controllers? Preferably old-skool, retro ones?

PS3 controller works out of box, with blue-tooth support.

----------

An EMULATOR is legal. They can't be sued for that.

However, the GAMES themselves can't be distributed by the same company. They 'assume' that you bought the game yourself and converted it to a ROM image, or got these ROM images from a legal source.

Of course there really are no 'legal' sources. You still can be legal, however - you could have bought the old Nintendo games, and have them stored in your attic, and just downloaded those same ROMs. That's the 'innocent idea' that the emulator makers are 'assuming'.

Somewhere, in some FAQ, or buried somewhere will be a link (or a hint on what to search for) to find these ROM images.

I remember some arcade game companies released the ROMs to the public so that their games won't disappear in the history once all the 80's arcade machines stop working.
 

lunaoso

macrumors 65816
Sep 22, 2012
1,332
54
Boston, MA
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