If you try and double-click on a ROM file to open it, you might find that nothing happens. Depending on the system you’re using, there are a few different ways to launch your game. Once you have the ROMs and emulators downloaded, you can actually play retro games on macOS. So don’t worry about finding macOS-compatible ROMs, since such a thing doesn’t exist. As far as the ROM is concerned, the emulator is the operating system. Note that ROMs themselves don’t care about your operating system. A number of torrent trackers include ROM downloads for a variety of systems, typically packaging hundreds of games together in one torrent. However, ROMs can still be found in the same places you might pirate other copyrighted content. As a result, major emulation sites have voluntarily shut down to avoid legal repercussions, removing a major resource for ROM downloads. While this was once overlooked by companies owning the copyright of emulated games, publishers have become less lenient in recent years. As you can imagine, this wasn’t exactly kosher from a legal perspective. It used to be that a number of websites offered freely available ROMs for download. It can run games from popular systems like NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Game Boy, and dozens more. The modular emulation program has quickly become the most popular emulation platform for macOS.

It’s like an emulation hub for the most popular retro game platforms. OpenEmu is a free, open-source project that can emulate multiple systems on macOS. Our strong preference, however, is OpenEmu. If you just want to emulate one platform, you can download a single emulator from here. Emu Paradise maintains a collection of Mac-compatible emulators you can explore. Emulator Zone provides the largest collection of functional emulators to download, but it can be light on Mac emulators. Some emulation systems can handle more than one console, but most are individualized. If you want to play PS1 games, you’ll need a PS1 emulator, and so on. If you want to play NES games, for example, you’ll need an NES emulator. Emulating a game requires two parts: the ROM, which contains the game data, and the emulator, which acts as the console system.

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