With OpenEmu, you can build an independently-maintained library of ROMs on your hard drive. You can use the “Open With …” menu to open a ROM file with the correct emulator.įor ROMs packaged as ZIP files, you’ll need to unzip them before you can apply this method. If the association isn’t working properly with your emulator, don’t fear. OpenEmu will automatically grab all the common ROM file extensions, so you can simply double-click on ROMs in Finder to launch the associated games. Some emulators will automatically assign the appropriate file extensions, while others will not. If you try and double-click on a ROM file to open it, you might find that nothing happens. Depending on the system you’re using, there are a few different ways to launch your game. Once you have the ROMs and emulators downloaded, you can actually play retro games on macOS.

So don’t worry about finding macOS-compatible ROMs, since such a thing doesn’t exist. As far as the ROM is concerned, the emulator is the operating system.

Note that ROMs themselves don’t care about your operating system. A number of torrent trackers include ROM downloads for a variety of systems, typically packaging hundreds of games together in one torrent. However, ROMs can still be found in the same places you might pirate other copyrighted content.

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