OpenEmu is an open-source multi-system video game emulator designed for macOS. It provides a plugin interface to emulate numerous consoles' hardware, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Genesis, Game Boy, and many more. The architecture allows for other developers to add new cores to the base system without the need to account for specific macOS APIs.
Version 1.0 was released on December 23, 2013, after a lengthy beta testing period. [1] Numerous incremental updates have been released since then, with plans to incorporate support for more consoles in future releases. Some of these in-development cores are available to download in an optional "experimental" cores build (released alongside the regular, "standard" version), containing support for arcade systems using MAME.
History
Beginnings
OpenEmu was first released on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 as OpenNestopia, a Cocoa-port written by Josh Weinberg for then Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger of the NES/Famicom emulator Nestopia (written by Martin Freij). [2] Weinberg and his friend, Ben Devacel, began searching for more developers to port other emulators to macOS, which led to the name change to OpenEmu in 2009, to better describe the multi-system emulator. [3]
1.0
OpenEmu 1.0 released on Monday, December 23, 2013 with 12 "cores" emulating Nintendo, Sega, NEC, and SNK's home, tabletop, and handheld consoles from the 3rd through 7th video game console generations. OpenEmu 1.0 needed Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x) to run. A Wednesday, October 15, 2014 (296 days later) midstream update to the OpenEmu library (1.0.4) would introduce Stella, a core emulating the 2600, a 2nd generation console from Atari.
2.0
Introduced on Wednesday, Dec 23, 2015, (exactly two years after 1.0) OpenEmu 2.0 was released. OpenEmu 2.0 began requiring a minimum of OS X El Capitan 10.11, dropping support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x) through OS X Yosemite (10.10.x). OpenEmu 2.0 introduced 16 new cores along with hundreds of bug fixes and lesser features. The new cores added several 2nd generation cores, support for optical media-based-image games, additionally emulating systems from Sony, Mattel, Bandai, Magnavox, Milton-Bradley, and Coleco. Another midstream update, 2.0.6.1, released Tuesday, Dec 19, 2017 (727 days after 2.0) added support for Mednafen's Sega Saturn branch, with a suggested quad-core i7 CPU to emulate.
2.1 and 2.2
OpenEmu 2.1 (Friday, October 15, 2019, 675 days after version 2.0.6.1; "coincidentally," exactly 5 years after the 1.0.4 Stella update) was significant, not for any new cores, but for supporting Metal, Apple's visual API successor to OpenGL and OpenCl, giving OpenEmu significant gains in both performance and battery life.
OpenEmu 2.2 (Friday December 27, 2019, 63 days later) added support for a downstream, Metal-forked version of Dolphin's GameCube branch, building on 2.1's foundation. This brings OpenEmu's number of supported cores to 31.
Reception
Upon its 1.0 release, OpenEmu was positively received, and subject to much online press coverage, praising the software's UI, features, and ease of use. [8] [9] [10] [11] In particular, it was praised by the gaming community for "[bringing] the idea of an emulator for a mainstream, general audience to reality". [12]
As of August 16, 2018, OpenEmu has been downloaded over 10,000,000 times since its version 1.0 release, making it one of the most popular multi-system emulators on macOS. [13]
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