This site is near death...emulation has declined also.

It definitely seems like it.

Vanilla Gamer has been down, don't hear much from OpenEMU twitter page, has been quiet on the the Retroarch front, only thing constantly changing is MAME and WINE. (which isn't always a good thing in some cases)

Yup, but as people age, their life changes course & what they used to be doing gets put aside for new hobbies & new things in life & consoles get more modernized, having more attention on them,

A lot of attention is put on RetroPie as well. Having a dedicated emulation station for 50 bucks is a pretty sweet deal.

I for one check this site everyday still and will continue to do so even though I almost never open an emulator anymore. I do hope that we can get archive.vg to represent a larger video game community one day.

I open OpenEmu about 9 times a week, best thing as far as I'm concerned

Like menace, I visit everyday even though I don't do much emulation nowadays (I pretty much only use Mini vMac and Sheepshaver, then occasionally something else for research purposes). And I keep the Video Game Media of the Day ticking along.

I think the exciting stuff in emulator development is behind us now, and the remaining challenges are things like cycle accuracy and the really difficult systems (Saturn, newer consoles, platforms that have no surviving documentation).

I have a partially-written news roundup dating back to early January that I never found time to finish. Was thinking of changing the news roundup format to have a few paragraphs of highlights and then a list of everything else, but I've been focused on other things — life gets busy when you're juggling full-time work (freelance, in my case) with study and several side/hobby gigs. It'd be great if someone else could put their hands up to take over news or do some blogging or whatever.

I grip to MacScene (omnipresent in my bookmarks bar for at least 8 years?) like an Internet safety blanket. I emulate regularly, but accept the fact that maybe we're just done talking about it? I'm predomoninatly an GNU/Linux user these days, not the fanboy I once was, and don't know why I visit here daily anymore. I'd gladly contribute to preserve an emulator DB on archive.vg, but I think these boards just aren't the same anymore. I've never met any of you IRL, but there's a familiarity about you all that's incomparable and more lasting than any other online experience I've ever had. I'm also definitely drunk.

I'd come more often if the latest emulator news was updated more often

Or has it been that there just hasn't been any news of new and updated emulators for OS X?

I've noticed the decline in popularity in emulators over the years...I don't remember having to roll my own from source code back in the 1990s, when the craze seemed to be at its peak.

Or it's simply been a matter of interests not aligning - while I find console games interesting, they take a back seat to my fondness for Apple II and IIGS, classic Mac, Japanese PCs (like PC88, PC98, etc) and MS-DOS, Amiga and ST. And interest in those seems to be waning (?).

I'd love to see Open Emu officially supporting arcade stuff too, but that doesn't seem to be a priority either.

It's a combo of things I think. People get older, lose interest in what they used to do, move on to things that require more time....& then new systems come out, more time on them...but for me, the old games will always be fun too. In fact I prefer side scrolling 2d games. I watched my son play Call Of Duty Modern Warfare, looks great, but doesn't interest me...Contra tho still interests me. Maybe cuz I'm more into old school things, than these modern games. Long live the older games.

I basically moved on from my projects when it was obvious that OpenEmu had blown them completely out of the water

To be fair though, it'd likely have happened anyway. As other posters have said, interests change over time... though it is tempting to try to roll a new version of Emulator Enhancer in Swift.

Perhaps some day...

I think there is definitely more room for more things in Mac emulation. Emulators on Mac are getting better with taking care of basic user emulator features (video, audio, input controls, etc.), and some emulators even have sporadic support for more advanced features like video filters, cheats, or save states. But developer features like GDB remote debugging, RAM watch, register writes, VRAM previews, and LUA scripting simply don't exist in Mac emulators. But I've seen several emulators on the Windows (and even Linux) side that do have these features. In other words, Mac emulators can't produce cool emulation-related content like TAS videos, ROM hacks, homebrew ROMs, or fan translations. If you want to do these things, you have to run Windows (or WINE).

On the Mac side, we're still trying to get our basic end-user features working in a native Mac interface, whereas other platforms, especially Windows, already have this established. OpenEmu is the shortcut to getting a whole bunch of emulators working natively on the Mac, and it does an extremely good job as an end-user focused frontend. But I don't see OpenEmu ever getting into the really advanced developer features. The current state of the project and the design of its GUI simply don't fit that paradigm.

This is why I still see a place for standalone emulators taking on the role of exposing every advanced emulation feature available for its platform, while multi-emulator frontends like OpenEmu take on the role of providing casual gaming that is easily accessible. And this is why I haven't given up on the Mac port standalone DeSmuME. I want Mac DeSmuME to have full feature parity with the Windows version while still feeling like a native Mac app. And I want Mac users to be able to generate NDS-related content without having to resort to using Windows or WINE.

I applaud Richard Bannister for doing so much for Mac emulation in the last generation (I grew up on all of his emulators!), and I applaud, and I also work with, the OpenEmu team for the current generation of casual gaming focused emulation. But there needs to be emulators with advanced developer features so that we can do our own content creation on our own platform. So I don't think Mac emulation is dying. It just needs to take its next step. Here's to the next generation of Mac coders to take it there!

Wow... yeah, I was wondering how the heck I was still on the "most active" list...

I've been doing some indie dev stuff that is not really emulation-related since no emulator I know supports the PowerGlove: www.psychsoftware.org/portfolio/?tab=Software&sec=Games (still, feel free to news it if you want). However, in the long and winding road since I was last on here regularly, I did manage to break some pretty big related news on nesdev; namely serendipitously acquiring the full source code to the onboard COP888 ROM on the PowerGlove, meaning that full accurate emulation ought to now be possible if anyone is inclined. Thread's at forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=95284#95284

What brought me back here for an actual sniff around was wondering if there are any good bank-at-once NES CHR rip/edit tools. Just as a what-the-heck side project to freshen myself up for interviews in Unity, I've found myself building a PPU homage which can take image-conversions of 128x128px CHR banks, slice & palletize them (on the fly, no less), and use them to build nametables, etc. with most of the bells and whistles of actual NES hardware. All the heavy lifting for backgrounds is done (including optional parallax effects); I'll probably start on sprites tomorrow. Temporary demo at www.psychsoftware.org/stuff/temp/UPPU_Web/UPPU_Web.html

But to get the CHR banks to work with, I've been relying on either

1. source BMPs from homebrews I've made myself, or
2. crafting a tedious process of manually reading iNES headers in a hex editor, copying the CHR block into a new file, unix-splitting that file, and script-processing the 8k chunks through an old chr2bmp dev tool I have kicking around.

Squirrel's tile-by-tile editor runs, but doesn't seem to do bank-at-once, and the last time I remember running a bank-at-once tool on Mac was in the OS8/9 days...

Oh, and I will reiterate the big props to Richard. My needs haven't really progressed since what is now "last gen," so I'm still mainly running his stuff. If OpenEmu has surpassed Nestopia, BSNES, etc., has anything out there surpassed AudioOverload? Yes, you can get plugins or other multi-players that do games on the side, but thus far their interfaces have all proven horrendous for navigating old chiptune formats...

I do agree props to Richard. I still run all his emu's on my old Mac Mini. Once you reach a certain point of emulation on systems, it's hard to see much more improvement. Doesn't mean the emu is dead, just "figured out".

Eventually MAME, now that it includes MESS, will run everything and probably accurately. I actually think this will be a good thing. It gives one binary to target for a frontend, etc, instead of having to configure a dozen different emu's. The next 10 years on this front should be exciting.

Mame & Mess I used to have fun with. I'm not a techie like most of you, I like things simple, & MacMame was simple...had it all, even cheats. Mess was simple too, back then. But since MacMame became unplayable on new OSs, and SDL versions are confusing as heck, & the front end I can never get it working.
\

I'm going to give QMC2 a go again as a frontend, although I do find it overly confusing. Oh for the days of MacMAME. Why do emulator developers not think like that anymore to make emulation is easier for all users (OpenEmu accepted)?

Anyways, QMC2 seems to get more complicated because now MAME and MESS are now combined in the SDL binary for OS X. I've got no idea how to setup MESS with QMC2, to specify the BIOS of each system I want to emulate (hopefully the BIOS ROMs I found for v0.149 on the Internet Archive are still good enough for v0.163.

But if ANYONE has setup MESS with QMC2 on Mac OS X, I'd love to hear from you.

I've been given a link to QMC2's forums, and I hope to get some help from there too: t.co/DEECLjkSbs (Thanks to R0ni, who maintains the SDL binaries for OS X).

- Alex

Nice work on the PowerGlove ROM, seanstar!

What does bank-at-once mean?
I assume you mean to do something to a whole CHR bank with one operation. But exactly what, I can't figure out. Import/Export?

The relevant project was/is the PPU emulator I put together in Unity (macscene.net/component/kunena/75-emulati...ityppu?Itemid=0#4062). The ROM development pipeline I know always involved full 128x128px 256-tile 8k CHR banks (1 pattern table) and there used to be tools to view/extract/swap a whole bank at a time. I was looking to rip some tilesheets from an actual game or two and see if I could mock the scenes up in my PPU emulator, but when I need to grab 256 tiles for a full pattern table, doing that 1 tile at a time is a pain.

No news update since November (over 8 months)

Where do you guys get your news fixes and talk about mac and emulation and related stuff?

It definitely has been a long time since we did any updates. I'm open to ides if anyone is interested in helping out.