In other words, you can jack in your favorite MIDI controller and go nuts with your favorite games, turning them into a live performance medium – then mashing up the resulting textures with real-time, 3D/2D effects. Here, you can apply textures to a cube, modify them with effects, cheat and rewind your way around the game, glitch out the cartridge - eventually make a live visual performance out of game textures with live gameplay and control input. Where that modularity gets really interesting is in the Quartz Composer form of Open Emu.

Real-time 3D effects, image processing – and route game controllers to those effects.

Audio or MIDI actually plays the game (and can also be used to make the game line up with music).

High-quality OpenGL scaling, multithreaded playback, and other optimizations.

They also fully support Mac technologies, even third-party niceties like Sparkle for automatic updates.īut, this being Create Digital Motion, we’re interested in the live visualist-friendly features: Game emulation is nothing new, but the programming team has build a friendly Mac front-end for a host of mature, popular emulation engines.

(In the immortal words of Strongbad, ain’t got no Turbografx? Sounds like you just need one more plug-in.)

Supported game systems for emulation: Sega Master System, Game Gear, SG-1000, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, and Sega 32x. Beta 2 of 1.0 extends the modularity of the platform, adds a finished Quartz Composer interface (allowing integration with other apps, live visuals, and graphical, modular patching using Apple’s development tool), and adds more emulation cores. The platform has been in feverish development for some time, but today a major new release takes it further. In other words, Open Emu is like having a giant visual performance synth made from the tasty innards of classic games. And thanks to that architecture, you can treat your favorite game systems as though they’re modules in a grand, 8-bit modular visual synth, crunching their textures into geometry, adding real-time effects, and controlling the whole thing with multiple controllers, audio, and MIDI. What makes it news is that at its core, Open Emu is an open source platform and modular architecture into which your favorite game systems can be added as plug-ins.

But if it were just a game emulator, well, it wouldn’t be news. Open Emu makes emulation of classic game systems a “first-class citizen” on the Mac. Here’s how it might look actually playing those games.įans of vintage games with Macs, take note. Favorite games from the 8-bit era and beyond, now with slick, Mac-friendly functionality wrapped around them.

Openemu controller