The rest of the UI is not so painless though. Well, I did have to hit the PS home button. I didn’t need to spend any time at all in RetroArch configuring my PS3 controller, I just plugged it in and that was it. Controller support is automatic: plug and play. The reason this UI makes sense for RetroArch is that it can be entirely game-controller-driven.

The RetroArch default interface is an homage to the Sony PS3 and PSP’s “cross-media bar” (also known as the XMB) design. Close to 100, although many of those are variations (several choices of GBA emulator, several choices of PS1 emulator, etc.) Compared to OpenEmu, RetroArch supports many more emulator cores. It also allows for far more configurability than OpenEmu, for better or worse. You can run RetroArch on your jailbroken PS Vita, Wii, or even a $35 Raspberry Pi. RetroArch is the application for the user, and individual emulators can be adapted or abstracted away by the LibRetro interface, turning them into “cores.” This is much the same way that OpenEmu works, but RetroArch is portable: it works not only on MacOS, but on Windows and Linux and even smartphones and jailbroken game consoles. Their goal is to run basically any emulator on any machine, using an underlying middleware API they call LibRetro. RetroArch is the relative newcomer on the scene. (Technically we have to call it a front-end, because it’s just providing a unified interface to a collection of already-existing emulators).

It’s a single player (and local multiplayer) multi-system emulator front-end. OpenEmu does not apparently support emulator tweaking (no super-hi-res PS1 emulation or widescreen hacks), nor does it support netplay, or streaming. When you add a game to your library, the box art thumbnail just shows up automatically, no further action required on the user’s behalf. As many Playstation 1 era games are turning 20 years old now and Sony has abandoned any concept of backwards compatibility, it’s great to have an easy way to manage an archive of our collections. bin/.cue file pair, you just add them as a pair, and they show up correctly without any trouble. In the past, adding CD-based games to your “library” in OpenEmu was hit-or-miss. When you run OpenEmu, all of the systems you see in the list are supported “out of the box.”

It’s a mouse-driven UI designed to focus on your ROM collection, organized by system. OpenEmu’s strength is its MacOS-native interface. Thanks to OpenEmu ( covered here previously), emulation of about 30 consoles “just works.” We also now have RetroArch, a competing multi-system emulator that works on far more than just MacOS. You no longer have to “get your hands dirty” to emulate a ton of game consoles on MacOS. Clearly I have not been updating this blog, but one of the reasons for that is that emulation has become much more user-friendly in the past few years.

Emulator frontend mac