An oldie but goodie...Hi everyone to those that remember me. Life was on a downhill runaway freight train since my last posting but like all things it ended and I've recovered and one of my first stops was here. While I play with openemu quite a bit it just isn't the same as it was and I still gravitate toward my original systems. I had to sell my mame cabinet due to the events of the past 5 years or so but emulation never stopped in me it just slowed down.

I sent Mossy a message to see if you guys n gals would like me to return to writing my RGOTW columns on some of the more odd games out there from arcade to 16 bit or below. While I mostly dabbled in Arcade or 8-bit I don't mind writing a bit (no pun intended) on the 16 bit oddities.

I came here and saw most of the old names I remember and it felt like coming home only to find a post that the door is not quite locked but barely open and I hear shuffles inside....

Anyway all I'd hate to have made it through what I did to come back to what I remember as the greatest Mac emulation site on the web the hell best emulation and mac stuff site on the web going under.

Pixelcade wrote:


What is RGOTW?

RGOTW = Retro Game of the Week (or Whenever, as it has been since that first year we were doing it).

Here's the archive of them.

For anyone who reads Archive, it's kind of a forerunner to my From The Archive column.

If anyone else would like to write one (or more) RGotW entry, give me a buzz. I'll edit it to read like a professional piece. And I'm happy to provide assistance earlier in the writing process with tips or guidance or whatever.

Similarly, if anyone would like to write up some Mac Classics Reborn or news posts, or introduce any new regular columns, all you have to do is put your hand up and we'll be happy to get you set up.

Looking through some of those old articles I remembered how much I actually like the design of the blogging system on this site. Would be nice to see some new content. If anyone's interested, let me know and I'll hook it up.

Retro Game of the Week if you'd like to see samples do a search using the site search and type in my user name you'll see a bunch of articles on games to see what a RGOTW is. Fun reviews of not just the game but I would spin them to the pop culture of the time and how a game on a system like say the NES got it's roots from something form an even simpler time.

ah yes I remember those, I would love to read more of those.

Great to see the site is still alive. For better or worse, here's my take on what's happening with Mac emulation.

1) When macs used 68k and PPC chips, there weren't a lot of Mac games out there. Also, a lot of emulators were total re-builds because they were originally designed for x86 chips. To me this made emulators more important and the once that were developed became more special.

2) Computers were slower back in the day. Current gen emulators were VERY tough to pull off and the speed was a big thing. As a result, I'd be CONSTANTLY searching for the latest update. Since speed was so important, I found that updates often increased the fps from say 1 or 2 fps to the native fps. Performance only updates were really cool.

3) I'm still young but I gamed as a kid, not so much as an adult. My gaming library looks a bit like an old DJ's records... for example one friend only mixes blues/jazz records made before 1980. My game collection is all retro nostalgia. The emulators I need have existed for years and are pretty well perfect. Many worked perfectly on my 233Mhz Bondi iMac, so obviously a quad-core i7 has no problems (emulating say a 33Mhz console). This limits my interest in new emulators regardless of how amazing... for example... a PS3 emulator might be.

4) There's so many quality remakes/remastered versions now!!! Should we be posting/blogging about these despite the fact they are usually not emulators? For example Grim Fandango is awesome. Dreamfall Chapters... is a sequel to a retro game that I only ever really played on PC emulators (and TLJ has been remade for iOS which is super awesome). I would argue that owners of the IP are realising that there's a market for their games. I'm a fully employed adult now and certainly don't mind paying for quality remakes. As a result, many of my favourites are 'remade' rather than emulated when I play them these days.

5) The newer generations have grown up with 3d graphics and consoles that IMO more closely resemple PCs plugged into TVs with a gamepad. I'd argue that the guys who grew up with the NES, for example, are now all about my age. Younger people probably don't have a lot of interest in the games that we enjoyed as kids. As a result, not a lot of kids are joining up. I have no answer for this one.

---

I think the face of emulation has changed. However, at the same time we've got more options than ever. There's also less tinkering/tweaking, which could arguably rule out a lot of community discussion. Playing some games at full speed with the least number of glitches was often a very fine art!

I'm glad this site still exists. Like another user above, my life fell apart for a few years and is now back on track. However, I work a 40 hour week and study law full-time. There is not a lot of time to play games and tinker with computers. I'm guessing many others are in a similar boat with different life stories/experiences.

Hi all. I've been quite ill of late, but making a recovery. Happy to see some conversation ignited here (turns out I did make a drunken comment a few posts back )

I think jetboy makes a good point that all of emulators I require have kind of been nailed. I'm also more than happy to throw a bit of cash at a developer who remasters a game, particularly as they're less likely to include emulation-related, game-breaking glitches (contrary to my previous point).

Glad to see a revival of RGOTW anyway, I was always psyched to pick up on 'new' titles to add to my playlist.

After months without updates, I finally got around to fixing some of the minor bugs on the site. If there's anyone who's interested in doing any content updates, just let me know. The Archive.vg project is ramping up again as well, if anyone is interested in helping out with that.

Nice! Any chance of syncing archive.vg with the OpenEmu DB? They could do with more content.

I bugged Mossy about the lack of updates in a comment on his latest Ars article... looks like he's going to be busy for a while.

I for one still visit this site daily.

For me, emulation has gotten to the point where the updates aren't totally meaningful anymore. I have a raspberry Pi 2 hooked up to a TV running RetroArch. It runs almost everything I want. I'd still love a Saturn emulator that really performs well. Emulating some of the newer systems would be great so I could put my old systems in the garage. (Oh how I wish light gun games worked on modern TVs). The progress on Dolphin is pretty amazing. If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend you do.

Also, I'm a full blown adult now with a two year old and twin newborns. My game playing time is... limited.

I still come here for the community though. I'm always happy to answer questions. I'm the DB backend guy for archive.vg and am looking forward to bringing that far in the near term. Whether the official build of OpenEmu ever supports Archive.vg is yet to be seen, but unofficial builds or a fork are certainly possible.

I have an 11 year old & probably older than some of you since my kid was born when I was 31, do the math. I don't really pay attention to emulation except OpenEmu, probably my favorite emulator. It updates annually, but I sometimes revise it via xcode. Still a stay at home dad & the only thing now is that I got a Minecraft freak in the family, my son. So out of all the devices he has Minecraft on, including the Wii, my Kindle, his ipod touch, etc, he prefers the Mac version best, so nowadays I share my iMac with him. I just got a refurbished one from Apple, my old one's video card was going to die any day & instead of trying to find a ATI Radeon old video card, I just up & went & bought a late 2015 iMac. (Old one was a late 2009 iMac...and most, if not all stores, are labeling the late-2009 "vintage") "Sorry, we don't sell vintage parts." It was a very good computer, OpenEmu & El Capitan even ran nicely on it, but I think 7 years is a good time for an upgrade iMac. The difference of the weight was noticed, when I had to pick up the old 27 incher to store it away, to the thin 21.5 incher which seemed much lighter in weight. I have a few questions though. Every time I have to restart, will I have to verify by getting a code on my other devices every time I restart? & Is there a way to turn that & entering the password when I wake up the computer, off? One other...Is there a good free dashboard widget that can tell me the temperature inside my iMac? I had a good one, but I forgot what it was.

For the auto login:

System Preferences - Login Options. Turn automatic login On. You will need to click the lock icon (bottom left of window) to make changes.

For screen saver:
System Preferences - Security and Privacy - General- Uncheck Require Password [option dropdown] after sleep or screen saver begins.

I don't monitor the temp of my mac, so I can't answer the last piece.

ty I'm maybe more paranoid about cooking the inside of my Mac than others. Not that I multitask 6 things at once, but my brother, when he visits us, at times plays this thing called Second Life, looks lame to me, but for some reason, it really heats up the insides, so I use the widget whenever he visits for a week.

TY for the info.

The OS has built in monitoring and will auto scale back the processor/video card (the video card is the real heat generator most of the time) to compensate for overheating. Performance will scale down and you may see screen tearing and stuttering as a result, but its not due to the actual heat, but the tick down in performance. I see this on my Retina Macbook Pro ALL the time when using Parallels.

If you have ruby installed, you could try this:
chris911.github.io/iStats/

just a quick question...on my old iMac, all I had to do was go into library/app support/openemu to see in the openemu folder, but there's no Openemu folder. Do I have to click on a box to unlock anything in Finder's preferences?

Try ~/Library instead?