This is enough to get you up and running, and there are lots of resources on the web for using MAME beyond the basics. Remember to setup Input Options (General) or per game, to make sure you can use your chosen controller. You can use your mouse or cursor keys to navigate the menus once launched, and press TAB in-game to bring up the options screen. Put unzipped game ROMs in the roms folder within the mame folder, and unzipped samples in the samples folder. I found this after I’d been running MAME from the command line for a while (if you want to do it this way, the easiest is to open a Terminal window, drag the mame64 icon to it, and press enter).

It’s just a double-clickable application that will launch MAME. Unzip it, and put it in your new MAME folder. Next, to make things easy, download a useful little application called M64, here. Once that’s done, unzip the MAME release you downloaded, and copy it to your Applications folder. Open the DMG, and copy the amework to /Library/FrameworksĪlternatively, you can install it in /Library/Frameworks if your access privileges are not high enough. You can download the latest version here.īefore you try and use it, though, you need to install the SDL2 framework, download it here. Thankfully, r0ni works really hard at maintaining a version of MAME that runs natively on OS X (via Command Line, it has no windowed GUI). It works great for most games, but you need to compile your own binary to get sample support for games like Zaxxon, and you can’t get access to the DIP switch settings for games, or advanced configurations.

The free OpenEmu is great for running all sorts of emulators on your Mac with a beautiful frontend, and I heartily recommend it for consoles and computers, but its MAME support is classed as ‘experimental’ – indeed, you need to download a separate build to get MAME supported at all.

Mac emulator all in one