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Announcements, press releases, information and corrections are always welcomed; feel free to send them to stiles@emulation.net.
If you have a question, please carefully examine the list of frequently asked questions below before writing in. Due to the overwhelming quantity of e-mail received by emulation.net, you will not receive a reply if you ask a question that was already answered in this list. If your question isn't answered here, though, please write me at stiles@emulation.net, but please don't send files or attachments without asking first.
- Where can I find games or ROMs for an emulator?
- I found an emulator that isn't listed on your page.
- I'm using Windows, and...
- I've got a classic system to sell (or I'm looking to buy a classic system).
- When I try to download, my browser tells me I'm missing a plugin.
- I downloaded an emulator, and I need help getting it to work properly.
- Downloaded files aren't working properly. They stop halfway through the download, or have problems decompressing.
- After I try to run an emulator, it tells me that I'm missing a file such as "AppearanceLib" or "NavigationLib."
- How can I use my old programs or documents on my Macintosh, using an emulator? The disks aren't compatible with my Macintosh.
- I'm looking for an emulator for some system that isn't listed on your page.
- Why doesn't someone port Callus/Genecyst/KGen/Vectrex/(other) to Macintosh?
- What exactly is an emulator? How do they work?
Many pages on emulation.net have links to sites which carry emulator software and ROMs, but due to the possibility of copyright infringement, emulation.net cannot endorse or link to ROM sites in some cases. For a detailed explanation, please read this message about distributing ROMs.
Odds are, you found BluePS2, m64, or maybe PSX-Emu. All of these are complete frauds. BluePS2 simply puts up a dialog saying that the CD you inserted cannot be read. m64 is nothing more than a copy of iNES 0.6, with redesigned dialog boxes and icons--apparently this was an anonymous April Fool's Joke from 1997. Although this emulator claims to run Nintendo 64 games, it won't--but it will run several 8-bit Nintendo ROMs. PSX-Emu is actually a trojan horse; it will infect your System file with a dangerous INIT resource if you run it, so I highly recommend that you stay away from this program!
There are also certain criteria that need to be met before emulation.net will list any software. Most importantly, any emulator listed on emulation.net must run at least one software title correctly before it is listed. This is mainly to prevent people from flooding the page with non-working, useless software.
Stop right there. emulation.net is dedicated exclusively to the Macintosh. However, if you're looking for emulators, I recommend you try Vintage Gaming, or Zophar's Domain. If you want a Macintosh emulator so you can run Mac programs on your PC, I recommend Fusion.
I highly recommend ebay. They are an excellent way to locate buyers and sellers of rare and unusual items, including computers. Their site is essentially a gigantic online auction house that anyone can participate in, just by signing up.
Most likely, this means that your browser has become misconfigured or is out of date. A workaround is to choose "Save to Disk," which instructs the browser to download the file normally. Afterwards, you will need to drag the downloaded file onto Stuffit Expander before using it.
Please try to contact the authors of the emulator directly before sending e-mail to emulation.net. They are likely to be much more familiar with their software than I would be. The author's e-mail address will usually be listed right next to the description of an emulator.
I am personally in charge of developing the Mac versions of following emulators: Stella, iNES, MasterGear, ColEm, fMSX, Virtual Gameboy, and SNES9X. If you are having problems with these emulators, feel free to contact me directly at stiles@emulation.net. Before contacting me, you might want to check the included documentation; all the known conflicts and their solutions are listed inside. If you're having problems with some other emulator, I am usually the wrong person to ask; I don't have the time or ability to field technical support questions for emulators that I didn't write. Direct e-mail links are usually available on the various emulation.net subpages, so please contact the emulator's author directly.
Stuffit Expander should be able to decompress any archive available from this site. Older versions of Stuffit Expander will not be able to decompress some files from emulation.net. If you are downloading files and Stuffit Expander is not recognizing them, make absolutely sure that you have the most recent version before complaining; in specific, version 5.0 can decompress many files that 4.x cannot.
Some ISPs have problems downloading from emulation.net. Specificially, AOL will often abort downloads when they are only partially complete. Some smaller ISPs, especially overseas ones, also exhibit this behaviour. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing I can do about this; usually the problem will go away in a few hours, though. If you receive corrupt or incomplete files often, it can help to use a utility called Monica.
Some Macintosh software requires additional system libraries before it can work properly. For example, AppearanceLib refers to the Appearance Manager, an extension developed at Apple that allows Macs running System 7 to use programs developed around the new Mac OS 8.0 interface. Users of Mac OS 8 and above should not need to install the Appearance Manager; it is already built into the system. If you're still running System 7, I highly recommend that you consider an upgrade to Mac OS 8 or later; you will find that fewer and fewer programs will run without the Appearance Manager software as time goes on.
NavigationLib refers to the Navigation Services library, a replacement for the archaic file open and file save dialogs from System 7. It is available as an extension for users of Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1; in Mac OS 8.5 and later, it is integrated into the system and should not be installed separately. Please note that the standalone Navigation Services extension has been known to cause problems on a few systems; if you're using NavigationLib and experiencing intermittent errors while using an emulator, consider upgrading to Mac OS 8.5 or later.
Some emulators use other libraries as well, such as OpenGL, InputSprocket or DrawSprocket. If an emulator cannot function without the installation of a certain extension, emulation.net will generally provide links to the necessary files along with the emulator itself.
Several computer platforms used 5.25" disks, or 3.5" disks with a format that is incompatible with current standards. For example, the Commodore Amiga used a special disk format which can't be read by the Macintosh. If you can't use regular disks to transfer software, it's usually possible to connect the two computers directly in some fashion to transfer data.
The easiest solution for file transfer is normally a modem connection from one computer to the other; if you have two phone lines and modems for each computer, this is a free, painless method of file transfer. Other solutions usually involve building a special cable to connect the two computers with a serial link. Unfortunately, I have very little experience with this sort of adapter, so I can't give any more specific advice.
In response to some common questions: Neo-Geo games can be emulated with MacMAME or GeoMAME. Color Gameboy games work very well with with Virtual Gameboy. There are no Newton emulators, no Sega CD, Sega 32X or Sega Saturn emulators, and of course there are no Dreamcast or Playstation 2 emulators.
All Mac OS emulators that I am currently aware of are already accessible through the table on the main page of emulation.net. The machine you want to emulate most likely does not have an emulator written for it yet.
People often ask me if an emulator for their favorite system is under development. My answer is almost invariably that I don't know. If I've heard anything about an emulator under development, and I'm at liberty to discuss it, the information will probably be on emulation.net already.
Many PC emulators are written in Intel assembly language, which is not directly portable to Macintosh. The PC architecture and Pentium instruction set is screwed up enough that most programs run much faster if written in hand-coded assembly instead of relatively simpler C or C++.
The PowerPC chip does not have the technical limitations and design flaws of the Pentium series, and so developers writing well-optimized C and C++ code can reach nearly identical speed to PowerPC assembly code. PC emulators written in C or C++ are usually very portable to the Macintosh, and generally perform better on the PowerPC than on the Intel architecture due to the superior processor architecture. Unfortunately, PC developers looking to overcome the limitations of C or C++ on the Intel architecture will frequently rewrite their code in assembly, which makes it nearly impossible to port but makes the PC version faster.
All emulators written by Bloodlust Software (Callus, Genecyst, and NESticle) are written in assembly, as well as ZSNES, KGen, Vectrex, and several other popular emulators. However, determined programmers have been known to take PC assembly code and translate it into PowerPC assembly or even back into C--this is a very slow, arduous process, but not an impossible one. In many cases, though, it's faster to just start from scratch than to port large chunks of assembly.
An emulator is a program which simulates a piece of hardware on your computer. In general, this simulation is done completely in software, so you shouldn't need to change anything with your computer's setup. Then, you'll be able to run Windows applications, Nintendo video games, arcade machines, Apple II+ BASIC and more, all from your Macintosh desktop. The best part is that most emulators are shareware or freeware, so you won't have to spend money to try them out. PC emulators are a notable exception; although you need to purchase them, both RealPC and Virtual PC offer very competitive performance and cost well under $100.
Emulators require a lot of processing power for best performance. If you still don't have a PowerPC-based Macintosh, you will want to upgrade; older-model Power Macintoshes are extremely inexpensive nowadays, while still running several times faster than the fastest 680x0 Macintosh. Even relatively simple systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System need a PowerPC-based processor for acceptable performance, and emulating most PC games at Pentium speeds is possible only on high-end G3 and G4 Power Macintoshes.
Some emulators require ROMs to do anything useful. Cartridge-based video games are encoded on ROM chips, and most computers store basic information in an onboard ROM chip. However, emulation.net will not provide ROMs for some systems because they are still copyrighted by the original developers. Please see this article about distributing ROMs for further information.
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