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Collecting old video game consoles and computers is a fun hobby, but it also takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of storage space
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Just ask my wife. You might instead choose to emulate on the modern Mac you already have
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So today I'm going to run through the three best apps you can use for the most common use cases
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Playing old video games, running old computer software, and even virtualizing modern software like Windows 11 and Linux, all on your Mac
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And best of all, all of these apps are totally free and open source. Number one, OpenEMU, easily the best way to emulate old video games on your Mac
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When you first launch the app, it'll ask you which consoles you want to enable, and you have all of these options from Nintendo, Sony, Sega, Atari, even some obscure ones like the Vectrex and the ColecoVision
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Basically, OpenEMU is a user-friendly interface on top of all of these other emulators that you otherwise would have to spend like an hour or more individually setting up
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But instead, you can just download ROM files online or legally digitize game cartridges that you already own and have purchased in the past
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And you can just drag the ROM files in so it'll automatically sort them by console on the sidebar, or you can create your own collections or smart collections to keep it all organized
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Just double-click to run. You can customize the inputs on a keyboard or using a connected controller
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You can create save states that you can save and resume at any point
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You can even use a shader to simulate the curve and blurring effect of a CRT television for old console games or the pixelated LCD of a Game Boy Color
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So click here to download OpenEMU from the project website. Number two, InfiniteMac is the easiest way to poke around early versions of macOS because there's no installation required at all
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Through the magic of WebAssembly, it is a series of emulators that run entirely within any modern web browser
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Through this interface, you can just pick your favorite version of macOS along with the classic Mac of your choice, and it'll instantly boot up directly from Safari
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All the installations come with the most popular apps and games of the era you choose, MacWrite and MacPaint, Photoshop, Microsoft Word, KPT Bryce, Marathon, Another World, SimCity, Lemmings, Civilization, and more
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You can add your own software that you find online from sites like Macintosh Garden with a simple drag-and-drop
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InfiniteMac will treat it like you're inserting a floppy disk. You can save your work by putting files in the Outside World folder, which will be downloaded instantly to your Mac
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Just click here to go to the InfiniteMac website. It's a great way to burn an hour or two
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Number three, UTM is by far the easiest way to emulate modern operating systems on your Mac, like Windows or Linux
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Compared to VirtualBox, I cannot overstate just how much easier UTM is to use
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I have burned countless hours in the past trying to get VirtualBox to f***ing work
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Once you download the app, just click the plus and the toolbar and click Download Prebuilt from UTM Gallery
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Any of these operating systems, you can just click and click Open in UTM, it'll download what it needs to, and it'll just run. It's that simple
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If you're my age, you might want to play some classic PC games like SimTower, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Quake 3 inside a Windows XP installation
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If you had some fun with InfiniteMac, but you want something more reliable and local to your computer, you can create a Mac OS 9 installation with one click
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You also might want to poke around Sun Solaris 9, an obscure operating system for some expensive workstation machines in the 90s
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I don't really know what I'm doing there, but it's just kind of fun to look at. UTM can also virtualize modern operating systems like Windows 11 for the few PC programs you might need to run
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And for software development, you can add any flavor of Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, DBN, there's a whole set
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If you develop Mac apps, you can virtualize any other version of Mac OS made for Apple Silicon
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That's Mac OS Monterey and earlier. It's so much easier than keeping a pile of Mac books in your office
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Trust me on that one. I actually plan on using UTM to virtualize the computers behind me right now, the Acer Travelmate and Mac Mini
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preparing for the days when they inevitably and predictably fail. So you can actually find UTM for free on the Mac App Store
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Links to all the other apps I talked about are in the video description. Remember to like and subscribe if you learned something from this video
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I'm Digaframe Jones with Cult of Mac
