Emulators are an important part of many classic game communities and give players access to features like netplay multiplayer, modding, and savestates, while also opening up the doors to enhancements not possible on console.

Maybe a couple years down the road, Apple silicon is really going to take off and be ultra powerful.Many gaming communities over the years have reached out to thank emulator developers for their efforts. Personally, I’m not going to be swapping out my x86 Windows or Linux machine for something like this. The developers need to get Apple M1 CPU’s in their hands so they can get this stuff working better. I couldn’t get the standalone version of PPSSPP working and when i tried to launch PSP games inside of retroarch, it just crashed. I definitely ran into some issues with Citra. Now it’s still really early so there are some emulators that aren’t working. So all in all emulation performance here is actually really great. I didn’t even bother going back down to 1080p seeing the performance in Auto Modelista at 4k. Since I was still here with the Dolphin emulator, I figured I’d throw a couple Nintendo Wii games at it. So basically we have two emulators running here at the same time and we’re able to achieve this performance. Tthis is actually using Rosetta 2 to emulate x86 so we can emulate a Gamecube game. We get minimal dips and when they did hsappen, it really wasn’t noticeable during gameplay.Īnother harder to run game that i usually test is Auto Modelista at 1080p vulcan back in and by this time everything was running great at 1080p so I figured we’d try to go up to 4k with Still at 1080p using the vulkan back-end performance is amazing here. I moved over to one of the harder games to run which is F-zero GX. At 1080p and performance was very very surprising. The next emulator that i tested was the standalone version of dolphin for gamecube and Wii. Diddy kong racing and 007 goldeneye both run great. N64 emulation in OpenEmu is performing great. God of War Chains of Olympus runs really smooth. It actually works really well and it runs these harder to emulate games just fine. It’s running at 1x resolution here but I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to do 3x and 4x with all the games. As soon as the developers of PPSSPP get a working version for these M1 Macs, I will run another test. So i wasn’t able to upscale at all with PSP. OpenEmu works absolutely amazing! There’s a ton of different emulators that are available here but the options are very limited. If you’re familiar with emulation on mac, you’ll know exactly what i’m talking about. With PSP I can’t get the standalone version to work nor can I get the version inside of RetroArch to work. The three different Apple Silicon Macs available are:

We’re gonna test out some Sega Dreamcast, Sony PSP, Nintendo 64 (N64), Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Wii (Dolphin).

I also want to get into some gaming but this article is strictly dedicated to emulation. But i’ve been really wanting to get my hands on one of these m1 chips so I could test out some emulation on it. When it comes down to it we’re actually running an emulator inside of an emulator and it’s kind of weird to think about. It’s a dynamic binary translator and it creates an application compatibility layer between x86 and the M1 chip. But what apple has done is introduced something called Rosetta 2. They were actually designed to run on x86 because that’s all these macs have been powered by for a very long time. Keep in mind when we get into running these retro emulators they were never designed to run on an arm chip. This is apple silicon It’s known as the M1 chip and it’s an ARM cpu. Not that it’s a new macbook coming out but that it’s powered by an ARM chip. Now i’ve actually been super excited about this. Today we’re going to be testing out some of our favorite emulators on the all new Apple Macbook Pro with the all-new apple silicon. Retro Emulation on the new Apple M1 CPU is Good

Dolphin (emulator) for mac