Fast forward to the release of the M2, and there are plenty of emulators available with native Apple Silicon support. Most used Apple’s Rosetta 2 transpiler, with varying degrees of success. When the M1 chip first launched in 2020, very few emulators had native Apple Silicon versions available. RELATED: Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal? Native Apple Silicon Emulators Are Now Available Many of these emulators require BIOS files that will need to be dumped from the original hardware, so make sure you understand the legal repercussions of using ROMs before you proceed. Of course, no article about emulation would be complete without making it clear that emulators are not illegal but downloading copyrighted material that you don’t own certainly is. It’s ideal if you missed out on consoles or gaming platforms when they were first released since stable emulators tend to lag the generation they’re emulating by a decade or more. On a Mac, this opens up a world of gaming to you that is simply not available natively. This is precisely why you might want to look at games that have already been released for different systems.Įmulators let you play games written for different hardware using software emulation. For most, this will never happen.ĭespite huge performance gains over Intel chips and better-than-ever 3D performance as Apple iterates on the Metal hardware-acceleration API, gaming on Apple Silicon has been slow to get off the ground. Some apps (and games) simply won’t run, and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope that the publisher will see fit to update the app in time.

There’s a performance penalty for converting an app, and not everything works. While Rosetta 2 works remarkably well most of the time, it’s not a perfect solution.

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