Exceptional game (and application) emulators for macOS - OpenEmu, Boxer, WineSkin

The Mac can’t be used for gaming? False! It has gotten a lot better in recent years and at any rate it just can’t be used for serious modern gaming, but if like me you’re a fan of old games anyway, a Mac offers you the most convenient and well designed emulation options out there.

There are three absolute must have apps for the Mac when it comes to emulators, all free and OpenSource. OpenEmu, Boxer and Wineskin. Wineskin lets you easily create Mac applications out of Windows games (and apps) using Wine. Boxer lets you do the same for Dos games using DosBox. And OpenEmu is for emulating console games, it looks absolutely beautiful, could not be easier to use and emulates more than a dozen consoles, including PlayStation, Nintendo DS and many more.

OpenEmu

This is the iTunes of console game emulation. It organizes all your roms, downloads covers for them and presents these to you in a really well designed interface. Want to play a game? Just double click the cover. Import a new game? Just drag it into the OpenEmu window. Close a game and it gets automatically saved at the current point in time, so the next time you start it, you continue right where you left off.

It works really well with Xbox 360 and PS4 controllers. The PS4 controller works by just plugging it into your Mac, for Xbox 360 you need to download and install a free driver.

Boxer

Dosbox is the best tool to get your old Dos games to work on modern operating systems, but it can be a bit hard to use for people who aren’t very familiar with Dos, but Boxer makes it trivially easy. It does all the hard work for you, you just drag and drop the game folder onto Boxer, follow the instructions to install the game if necessary, add a nice cover image you find on the Internet which is then going go be used as an Icon for the game.

Unlike OpenEmu, Boxer doesn’t organize your games. Instead it creates macOs apps and there is a normal folder that holds all of these apps, but Dosbox changes the design of that folder using macOS features which make it look like a nice wooden cupboard that holds all of your game boxes.

GOG.com, “Good old Games” actually makes use of this software to port old Dos games to macOS and sell them, so you might have been using Boxer already without knowing it. They even hired the Boxer developer to add some additional features they needed.

Wineskin

Out of the three apps, this is the hardest to use, but it’s still fairly easy, especially compared to using Wine directly from the command line. Here you can configure everything graphically. Just take some time to go through the options. Like Boxer, it creates macOS apps out of your games that you can move anywhere you want and double click to start, it doesn’t organize/import your games like OpenEmu does. Also like Boxer, you can set a box cover as the icon for the resulting application to make it look nice.

Disclaimer

Make sure your use of roms for emulators is legal in your country. I do not advocate for breaking the law in this article. You need to own the games you want to emulate.

There is also a “homebrew” community for pretty much any old gaming system you can think of, programmers who develop games as a hobby for these old platforms that you can legally download for free. OpenEmu even has a built in Homebrew section that lets you download those games. And in some countries, you are allowed to create a digital copy of your old game cartridges and use the resulting roms on an emulator.