Cool demonstration of the capabilities of OpenEmu for OS X using the iPad as a second monitor. (via)

I’m looking forward to OpenEmu, which is still in private beta (though you can compile the source). I haven’t played my old GameBoy and SNES games in years, but, in the light of recent Nintendo announcements, I’d like to play them on a computer today. OpenEmu is promising:

Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game-engine plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.

From what I’ve seen so far, OpenEmu will support both hardware controllers (with lots of configuration options) and software solutions like Joypad (which we reviewed).

Matt Gemmell had an excellent article a while back on playing Nintendo games on a Mac, with lots of great photos as well.

Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, we don’t condone piracy here at MacStories. Either for apps or games, don’t be greedy. Support developers and buy original games. As Matt also says, most second-hand consoles and games are cheap on eBay these days.