Rob Marquardt

Frozach Submitted

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There are few great emulator options for OS X, but that is set to change in the near future as multi-source system emulator OpenEmu prepares for an official launch.

Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game-engine plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.

OpenEmu, which has been in beta for quite some time, is able to emulate the hardware of several different consoles. Version 1.0 of the software will include support for several 16-bit systems, including the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo, among others.

Support for additional systems like the Nintendo 64, the Nintendo DS, and the Sony PlayStation will be added in the future.


The emulator features a slick iTunes-style design, displaying downloaded ROMs in a menu organized by system. Designed from the ground up for OS X, it offers up a native OS X interface.

With full save state support, the software allows for multiple ROMs to be played at once and it also provides OpenGL scaling, multithreaded playback, and gamepad support.

At this point in time the team behind OpenEmu is working on polishing the app and adding final artwork, but the release is "close."


OpenEmu was previously available as a beta download and the beta version of the application can still be acquired by downloading and compiling the source code via Xcode. A full set of instructions is available here.

I have always had a bad relationship with wallets. It was just one more thing I had to carry because there was no way to keep IDs and money organized in my pocket on its own. After one of my wallets wore to the point of me actually throwing it away, I decided I'd try to make the most efficient wallet ever. More »

Jennifer Lewis imagines a different sort of Mad Men appropriate for children. Don Draper is Kermit and Miss Piggy is Joan Holloway. Follow the link to see which Muppets Ms. Lewis matched with Pete Campbell, Megan Draper, Roger Sterling, Peggy Olson and Betty Draper.

Link -via Walyou

Last year, my friend Chris Novello closed the 2012 Open Hardware Summit with a demo similar to this performance — remixing SMB in ways nobody had ever thought of before — to wild and well-deserved applause, I might add. Here he is doing it again! He writes:

In this video, I directly manipulate the RAM state of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers to transform it from a game into a strange instrument.

First, I play the game as it is traditionally played.. but I have access to the game’s memory, so I change Mario’s Y position using the Madrona Labs Soundplane (a surface that sends data to the computer about where it is being touched). This is how I hover Mario during the playthrough.

Also, before I start playing, I flip a switch on illucia that I assigned to trigger recording — not video, but actually recording the entire memory state of the NES for each game frame.

Think about it – Mario’s universe is held in RAM, which the NES uses to draw his world for each frame of the game. By recording the entire state of the NES memory for every frame, I’m able to go back to any moment in Mario’s life.

So then I use the X-axis of the Soundplane to sweep through the timeline of Mario’s universe.

Not only that, but the Soundplane is multitouch, so I use a second finger to specify start and endpoints in a playback loop. Technically, this is similar to the way samplers and granular synths work in audio.. but with the entire memory state of the NES. Conceptually, it is like Super Mario meets Groundhog Day. Mario’s universe computer/time machine gets caught in hellish loops.

Then I start using illucia to send alien data into various other places in Mario’s universe, which makes for all sorts of audiovisual insanity amidst the spacetime loops. This is sort of like circuit bending, but in a protected sandbox – at any point I can revert back to the clean recording of RAM states (aka moments in Mario’s universe).

I then try to go back to “playing” the game, watching Mario navigate a melting world of glitched-out ephemera. I then push things into full on glitch insanity. I use a pair of rubberband mallets on the Soundplane to jump around in Mario’s universe while leaving illucia to send a heavy stream of alien data into Mario’s RAM state. I eventually (accidentally/luckily) land at a place that triggers the game over music, and end the take.

Submitted by: Unknown

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