As much as I’ve enjoyed figuring out how to hack my mini, OpenEmu is probably a much better and easier experience. Of course, comparing what a hacked Sega Mini can do to what an emulator program on a Mac can do is like comparing apples to grapes - and I love grapes, but if you were just looking for one solution to start playing old retro video games, and if you already have a Mac, I would say that maybe you don’t need to bother getting yourself a mini console to hack and you should just stick with your Apple. Also, organizing/sorting your video game library ( you can even give games star ratings) is a lot nicer on OpenEmu when compared to Hakchi. Same thing with all the Playstation games that wouldn’t work properly on the Sega Mini ( which was a lot of the sports games), those all now work nicely on my Mac. So all those Nintendo 64 games that your little Sega Mini couldn’t handle, those now play pretty perfectly on OpenEmu. The one major advantage to using OpenEmu to play retro video games on your Mac instead of on a hacked Sega Mini is that your Mac has a lot more processing power. Not only does this controller work with the Sega Mini ( if you happen to also be playing on hacked mini consoles), but if you flip the switch on the back from XINPUT to DIRECTINPUT it will also work on your Mac. If you don’t have a USB controller already, I would recommend grabbing the Logitech Gamepad F310 ( which I was able to get online for $25). And for all my Master System / Turbo Grafx-16 / Atari / Neo Geo / 32X / Playstation 1 games, I used a site that rhymes with “The-Rye dot Pee You”. For all my GENESIS / SNES / NES / N64 / GAME BOY roms, I got them from a site the rhymes with “Jim’s Hair”. So, as I have done before, I will just recommend that if you do a search like ‘safe place to download roms reddit’ and then check out some of the sites people recommend on there, you’ll be on your way in a couple clicks.

When it comes to “where do I find all these games/roms to download?” - I can’t really answer that, as I don’t want to be the guy that outs a good spot for downloading roms and ruins things for everyone else. It’s a rom site that I haven’t actually used before myself, but feel free to try that site out if you don’t find my cryptic advice on where I got my roms from helpful:

This video also shows a site where you can download roms. For example, it wasn’t until I won a flat screen tv while watching the 2020 Super Bowl at my local pub that I started thinking about maybe getting an old video game system to hook up to our first tv in years, which led to me discovering that they now make mini consoles that come loaded with a bunch of games, which led to me discovering that you could also hack those mini consoles to add any games you want, which led to me ordering a Sega Mini right before the global pandemic kicked in and we all went into quarantine mode, which led to me going deep into the rabbit holes of mini console hacking and retro video game Youtube, which led to me writing blog posts about how to hack a Sega Mini and creating lists of games that I find enjoyable to play as an old millennial in the 2020s.Īnd because hacking my Sega Mini involved me getting a whole sh*t tonne of roms on my computer + getting a USB controller that could work for PS1/PSP and below consoles - I eventually got around to wondering if/how I could play these games on my Mac ( although, I first wondered a lot about if it was possible to somehow hook my Sega Mini up to my iMac as an external monitor, because I am an idiot).Īs you can see, sometimes blog posts can be a bit more convoluted than they need to be too, because, in order to play retro video games on your Mac, all you need to do is download and install OpenEmu, and, like with all retro video game figure-out-ery, you can find Youtube videos like this one below that’ll walk you thru all the easy steps: The path I took to realizing I could just play any old retro video game right here on my old 2009 iMac was a bit more convoluted than it needed to be, but, hey, sometimes life is a bit more convoluted than it needs to be.

Retro game emulator for mac