Retro Gaming on a Mac Mini (is Now Awesome) 

Thanks for the lively discourse in the comments. Some notes (I may update this as more comments come in): - This M2 Mac Mini is currently on sale for $499 on Amazon: amzn.to/3KhxlCH - Although development has halted on the emulator, AetherSX2 is available for Macs with silicon chips and I tested it after making this video. It runs like a dream, and resolves any issues I had with PS2 games lagging in PCSX2. I was able to play God of War II and Jak & Daxter at 4K resolution with zero issue. I've added more info to the written guide. - For the Sega Saturn interlacing/combing artifacts in Beetle Saturn, I found that using a CRT royale or bob shader resolves the issue. Some options include misc/bob-deinterlace, misc/bob-and-ghost-deinterlace, crt/crt-geom, crt/crt-royale, and crt/phosphorlut. - The heavy-duty CRT royale shaders work great on this setup within RetroArch, even with a combination of other features like run-ahead and rewind enabled, every core ran at full speed. - Regarding input lag on MacOS, I ran a series of tests with retro games including bluetooth and wired controllers, and tried to tax the system heavily with shaders and other features enabled, and everything still ran very well. I didn't feel any difference compared to playing these same games via RetroArch on a Windows PC, although adding run-ahead of 2 did make the experience feel a little more responsive (and still played very well). I wouldn't consider myself extremely sensitive to lag but it was a genuinely excellent retro gaming experience. - I understand the Apple hate, for example I don't agree with their stance on repairability and user upgrades. But it is also nice to see what other computers can accomplish outside of general Windows/PC spaces, and enjoying retro games on a Mac doesn't need to turn into a competition with other platforms. The reason for making this video was to show that if you own a Mac, or are interested in getting one, it does a great job with emulation right now. As a point of clarification, MacOS is not "walled off" in the same way that iOS and iPadOS is -- you can freely install apps (as is demonstrated with installing the emulators in this video).

I found your channel a couple of weeks ago and have been hooked. I've watched a bunch of your videos on retro handheld emulators. This guide is perfect for me as I have a Mac. While I've been able to run different emulators, it's always nice to find a guide that is using the same OS I'm using and is very detailed. Keep up the great work!

For the mac users, I hope that Valve eventually makes a version of Proton available as well.

If you get the “unknown developer” pop up, you should be able to right click on the app and click open, this time it will give you a “run anyway” command. Should save you from having to go into the settings app to find and allow it like you did

I absolutely loved this. While more than half was review as I already casually enjoy retro on my MBP M1, the remainder was pure gold. Time to complete my retro arcade setup! 😎

So much easier to drag apps out of the dock instead of using the context menu. Also, you can launch the app by ctrl- or right-clicking on the app and choosing Open (at least that worked up to Monterey, maybe they changed it in Ventura).

So glad I found this channel. Loving your content, great work!

I was waiting for you to make this video. Keep it up Russ!

I think this will be a very good value in about 2 years once corporate users start selling these to upgrade to a newer model. These are very popular among creative workflow offices right now, so there should be a very healthy supply of them once that sell-off happens. Plus we should see emulator support for Mac / Apple silicon be a lot more mature in a couple years time, so performance will be better on the same hardware.

I just got an M2 Mini. I’m going to try this out. Thanks for this.

Regarding Dolphin Stuttering, you can enable “Compile shaders before start” so it doesn’t stutter even on the first run

Shoutout to that mewithoutyou shirt

Out of all the retro game review channels I watch, you are the only that shows your face, and I really like it. I think it helps the audience feel more connected with you. Love your content, keep it up!

The M1 Mac mini was my first Mac computer and honestly it’s been my primary computer ever since

This is incredibly useful. I'm going on a work trip and don't want to bring 2 laptops but don't want to be bored to tears overnight or during the flight. My work computer is a Mac and I'll be outfitting it with Dolphin and Retroarch. I have an Android phone, but some of the emulators have really bad lag. This saves me a lot of bag space. Thanks!

I'm also a primary mac user so I'm glad to see this :D I really hope Apple catches up with the gaming cause there is a huge audience of people who would like to have one or two devices to enjoy the games they love most :)

Great tutorial! Thanks as always!

You’re the first person I’ve ever seen with a Mewithoutyou shirt. I’ve seen them plenty of times in our hometown of Philadelphia. Great video as well, but you already knew that. 👌

13:05 if you right-click/control+click on the app it will then give you the "Open" option even from an un-trusted developer. Saves a trip to settings. Great video!

Already have the base M2 Mac Mini. I use Dolphin on it already and it runs very well. One thing I'd like to mention is if you're a student or a teacher, you can get the base M2 Mac Mini for $499.

I have been doing a lot of Gamecube and Saturn emulation on my Mac mini. It’s been great.

I've been running Citra on my M1 Macbook Air for a while now, and it has been great emulating 3ds games. There is a specific ARM build for it that someone made, but I found it too buggy (it would randomly crash too often). So I have been just using the old Mac build and running it through Rosetta and it has been great.

Another thing to mention is that joycons work with mac now and are great to use with dolphin as a wiimote.

Finally! Been waiting for this video since 2020. :)

What a great video, huge thanks to you! I've been messing around with the Dolphin emulator on my MacBook Air M2 (16 GB Ram) and tested Resident Evil 4, The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Gun, Super Mario Sunshine and it's pretty impressive. My device never gets heated, games are running smoothly. And OpenEmu is just a great way to play GBA and Sega games easily. I love how most of the emulators works great on M1-M2. Soon I'll try Cemu for the WiiU games. Thanks for the video again, I'm sure it'll help lots of people just to get opinion about emulating games on Mac!

I just bought a refurbished M1 mac mini and I am excited to see what retro emulation I have fun with on it. Thanks for this timely (for me) video! The pricing for the M2 machines aren't so enticing when you earn and spend in Canadian dollars so I'll have to live vicariously through M2 owners to some extent. :).

Kudos for the Maldita Castilla running in the background. Awesome game...

Tip: you can also right-click the app that only gives the "move to trash" or "Cancel" options and click "Open" from that context menu, and it'll give a prompt that features an "open" button so you can access it normally :)

Recently got a mac mini to try for the first time and I liked it so much that now I use it as my primary pc and then I stream my pc games with moonlight.

This video rocks! I didn't know I could game on my Mac :) Now I want to try it out

Great guide! I really considered getting a Mini, but the exchange rate didn't make the price as attractive in Japan. Bought a used powerful desktop PC (Ryzen 7 5800X + RTX 3070) locally, but hope to replace my underwhelming Windows laptop with a MacBook someday since I like working in both environments. Maybe I'll get a Mac Mini for my mom 🤔

I’m quite enticed by the low price point along with the 2TB external SSD. I’d use someone’s college info to get that sweet sweet discount. One of my fave things about your content Russ is how you provide cost effective alternatives & solutions to expensive gear and/or tech.

Appreciate the video, thanks! A lot of discussion on the internet is basically "hurr durr just get a better pc for same money" but I got mac for work and far away from home and got to make do with what I have.

OpenEmu is amazing and honestly I prefer its design over a lot of the PC offerings. It's a better "out of the box" experience as well. Something like LaunchBox is really neat and customizable, but it can honestly feel overwhelming for users. OpenEmu is nice because you can just drag and drop ROMs and it'll scrape the information and allow you to boot seamlessly from its launcher (for supported emulators). I just wish they had more integration for 6th generation consoles.

Good stuff, keep it up.

Great video! Awesome shirt too

I had a macbook many years ago with OpenEmu and it was pretty nice to use.

I haven't tried PCSX2, but AetherSX2 ran all of the games you showscased flawlessly out of the box. I'd consider using that over PCSX2.

Im not sure if someones pointed it out yet but at 7:50, that is not Shadow of the tomb raider, its actually Rise

Great video! With all the emulation talk, you should also mention Windows emulation via Parallels or Vmware Fusion! Many games work with no problem on my M1, even Anno 1800! Not everything works though, like recent titles like Diablo 2 Resurrected. But playing Anno 1800 in a ARM Win VM on M1 is amazing! :)

the "open anyway" for unsupported devs/apps can also be done with just right click on the icon and open.

I have the Mac Mini M1 model that came out a couple of years ago. I like both Mac and PC for totally different reasons. Yeah, Macs aren't the best for gaming (though getting better) and Apple does have poor user upgradiblity and pricing. One thing I like though is that apple stuff just WORKS. It connects seamlessly and stuff transfers over without any issues. Like I may wanna upgrade my cheap mac-mini with a more powerful mac mini (in time) and I know I'll be able to transfer over all data in my sleep. Cuz it's Apple.

my plan is to buy one with more ram as an all purpose machine so i'm looking forward to play and work hard on an impressive beast, the fact the entry model only has 8gb and still performs that well is mindboggeling.

For Cemu I would recommend turning on async compilation, it completely eliminates stuttering

16:06 I would guess that the Fighting Vipers game is actually running in 480i and the emulator is only doing a simple weave deinterlacing. I've seen this happen with some ps1 emulators on games that run in 480i. I would guess that either rendering at a higher resolution or if possible, changing the deinterlacing method in emulator settings to something different, would both fix the "issue". Not really an issue though, just a weird quirk that makes the visuals look different since we are not playing on CRT TVs anymore.

this i pretty awesome to see. im using an old mac Mini from 2012 running batocera to run classic games.. runs DreamCast, Ps1 and N64 pretty solid.. havent tried but want to test xbox on it and ps2 at some point.. the Minis are sleepers for sure. i went with batocera for a fail proof system my GF could use as she loves the retros more than i do.

Love the shirt. My fav songs: Fox's Dream of the Log Flume and Watermelon Ascot

Oh nice! I'm glad you put this together, I'm already using a 2012 mac mini as my Media computer, and I've had a few emulators running on it from time to time, but nothing as comprehensive as what you've set up here. I know a bunch of these won't run on my legacy Mini (or not very well) but it's inspired me to dig in a little deeper and clean up my emulation system a bit more.

I didn’t know there were other options out there for Mac besides open emu. I can finally play twilight princess! Thanks for these guides homey

I have been waiting to get a M2, currently running 2 iMacs with TDM as my daily set up

You can actually set the dock to autohide in the system settings so it will never show up unless you push your cursor against the bottom edge of the screen. You can also bind autohide toggle to a key. I have it binded to my F17 key, very useful I believe you can also remove the fullscreen transition animation with terminal commands, but I'm not sure if it still works in the new macOS

That's really cool you can boot straight into Emulation Station on powering the Mac Mini up.

Dude! The shirt!!! I saw mewithoutYou in a small cafe show in PA back in like 2001 or something way before their first album dropped. Back when they still played "Flamethrower" lol! Haven't thought about them in years.

Great job Russ!

Love the mewithoutYou shirt. Happy to see you're into "retro" music too. :)

I love every video that you make 👌

Those lines you saw in Fighting Vipers are that Beetle core isn’t deinterlacing the image. I’m pretty sure that can be fixed but I can’t look right now.

Excellent, thanks for sharing!. I rarely comment on youtube videos, but this one is so well done and anticipated most of the qs I have. I am planning to do the setup but in my main mac, a laptop with the M2 chip. I got a 2TB drive with Batocera and games already in, planning to have the content in a 2TB SSD in the dock of my mac. Newbie quick q: any hints about how to transfer the roms/etc in the 2TB batocera drive into the setup you recommend for macOS? Cheers

Recently bought an M1 MacBook Air. It’s had virtually identical performance up to WiiU, even at upscaled resolutions.

I'm emulating on M1 Mac Mini and it's freaking awesome!

I used mac way back when the imacs were white, the first Intel ones, and decided to get a mac mini when the m1 chip came out. I got it for video editing and OBS but it turned out to be my daily driver. I have played some SNES/Genesis but not much else. I'll have to give all these emulators a shot and see how the m1 mac mini does!

Absolutely Awesome Shirt!

You can even change apple loading logo with emulatonstation logo :D Also, you can completely disable the dock in terminal

The kerrygold comparison gets me every time.

MWY shirt alert! Love it.

Awesome video

Haha! I love the butter block size comparison.

Your videos are awesome

I bought an external 2 TB Harddrive full of Games from Ali Express. It works fine on my MacBook Air mid 2013 and also on Windows.

Trying to get Retroarch working with the 8bitdo m30 6-button controller for Sega games drove me insane. I gave up and used OpenEMU where it took all of 5 seconds to map the controller buttons.

I run OpenEmu, Redream, and Dolphin on a 2019 MBP and they run perfectly fine.

Actually for 3DS you can run an experimental version of Citra and runs pretty well.

Only just installed ryujinx last week on my m1. Having grown up in the 80s with NES and pretty much forgetting about gaming for the last 30 years, I am now having a blast showing all this stuff to my 7 year old daughter. I suspect buying a switch is on the cards in the next couple of years

Sweet shirt, dude!

Tip: you can just drag icons in and out of the Mac dock

These videos are interesting to me, especially since I know that I won't buy a Mac. I am glad that there is emulation support for Mac users.

Love the mewithoutYou shirt!

I have spent many hours doing research into which mac device that I should purchase. I realised that even the base Mac Mini meets all of my needs other than 2. Portability and gaming, neither of which are extremely high up on my priorities list. To solve the portability problem, I realised that I could purchase a portable monitor and the price would still sum to about half as much as the next cheapest solution. I realised that to be able to comfortably play large games like Cyberpunk 2077, I would need to spend 4x as much on an M3 Pro MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio. This wasn't an option, and I'm not a PC gamer anyways, so I decided to settle for retro gaming which aligns much better with my general usage anyway. I didn't know if the base Mac Mini could handle retro games and was prepared to go for something significantly more expensive to ensure that I don't run into any issues. However, this video has saved me a ton of money by showing me that the Mac Mini is even more capable than I'll probably need it to be. :)

Not sure if it will fix your Dock showing up problem, but go to System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Automatically hide the dock (change to yes)

Really digging the mewithoutYou shirt.

Great video, but there are a couple of nitpicks I have with the emulator settings: for Dolphin, they actually have (and have had for a couple of years now) a working solution for shader compilation stuttering, it's just not enabled by default for some reason. If you go to the "Graphics" configuration, then under the "Shader Compilation" section, simply enable "Hybrid Ubershaders" (Also, make sure you're using the "Metal" backend as that generally gets the best performance for Apple Silicon processors). From my experience, it doesn't 100% eliminate stuttering, but it drastically reduces it to the point where it's basically a non-factor, even when doing the first run of a game. Additionally, with Ryujinx, the MacOS build has broken vsync as well as broken rendering in Metroid Prime Remastered. They're fixed in the mainline builds which you can build manually yourself, but it takes a bit of knowhow and many games that work on the MacOS build won't work on mainline and vice-versa (A big one is Pokemon, mainline currently doesn't implement transform feedback which is required for Scarlet/Violet). The future plan is to have MacOS support, which is currently a closed-source version of the emulator with Mac-specific hacks, fully implemented in the main branch, but that hasn't been finished yet. Everything else was pretty spot-on from my experience with an M1 Max, although the additional CPU headroom from the M2's frequency boost is greatly appreciated for emulators like RPCS3 or Ryujinx. Once again, great video and a great introduction to emulation on Apple Silicon!

For the "Unknown Developer", if you Right-Click or Control Click on your Mac, choose Open and it just ask you to authorize the App with your Login Password.

At 27:46 he mentions that the dock always pops up when quitting a game. Has anyone found a Mac OS setting to stop that from happening? My controller doesn’t have a home button so I have to grab a keyboard every time.

would love to see you test an i3 12th gen mini pc or optiplex if compatible. Would be cool to see how it stacks up to the i5s you have done.

Fairly new to channel but never knew you had a face...lol ...... Good to put a face to the great content! Keep it up.

Nice!! You should cover emulation on Apple TV 4K

As a long time Mac user, and RU-vid humor Video Game channel host, it’s great to see this kind of video illustrating simple emulation setup on a Mac. I love my Mac mini M1, and now I may have to get that external SSD just for doing this on my Mac mini. Thanks for the great vid!

Thank you for such an in-depth video. Does Force Feedback on the controller work with these emulators on Mac? No one seem to mention this.

Always loved the mac mini pcs.

note on the quietness/thermals - apple is focusing on being quiet like A LOT. they have some weird settings on this. i have the m1 macbook pro and i can reach 76C without the fans kicking in. and i mean not that they are quiet, i mean they are turned off. i think they turn on after 80C or something like that, which is kind of ridiculous. i guess if the chip is ok with such temperatures this is ok with the desktop versions, like the mac mini, but the laptop versions, if you hold them in your lap, its getting REALLY hot. so i downloaded the Macs Fan Control app and put a custom fan curve.

I have an M1 Pro but I couldn’t really play Metal Gear Solid 3 for PS3. Not sure if there were some updates since then or if I just needed to give the shaders time to buff. But I’ll be giving it another shot!

The Kerrygold butter caught me off guard.. 😂... I near Kerry.

Thats why I bought a refurb i7 2020 iMac with the Radeon XT card last year. I can have the absolute best of both world. This computer is still pretty decent for gaming on Windows 10 via bootcamp and I love to play retro games on macOS. I'll keep this mac as long as I can.

Good old Kerry gold irush butter, wasn't expecting that 😂

Nice video! Just a comment regarding the bugs mentioned when it comes to window switching. While you could argue that it is indeed bugs I don't think either ES-DE or the emulators are to blame but rather the bizarre window management in macOS. So this likely needs some work from Apple as there is a lot of broken behavior on macOS that is not existing on any other operating system. Window switching is in the domain of the window manager which is part of the operating system, it's not up to applications to handle this or to implement workarounds if the OS can't do it properly.

Dock icons... you can also just drag them from the dock to desktop to clear them. Quicker.

impressive little machine!

I sold my Nintendo Switch and been in emulator heaven! Played Front Mission Remake, FE Engage, Octopath Traveler from start to finish. Currently playing OT2 and there are so many cheats for every game. I like the 60FPS hacks for most games. Been playing PS2 and PS3 games as well and using PS4 controller for all my emulators. The Mac Mini is a powerful computer that can also run windows games via virtulization like Parallels or Wine. Can't go wrong with newer macs.

I've been using Apple since the early 80s and I never thought I could do any real gaming on it. This may be the answer to my dream of having a single box that plays all the emulators I want, and it's cheap! It may also be my next everyday Mac.

Great video. I am not a Machead. Interesting to see how apple emulates games. Awesome ps3. Sad ps2 doesnt work as good. Im sticking with my Mele 3Q for now. Keep up the great work.