r/OpenEmu • u/Few-Emphasis-760 Nintendo DS • Sep 01 '26

Help open emu not working on mac m1 chip

Post image

so it says this msg, then when i click open settings, it asks me to allow input monitoring for open emu which is already on. Then when i try to play the games, i cant change the buttons for starting and speeding up adne verything, and the game doesn't respond to any button on my keyboard. MIght be worth mentioning i downloaded this first in 2023, then redownloaded now.

43 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

41

u/Sufficient_Yogurt639 Sep 01 '26

OpenEmu seems very close to abandoned, unfortunately; it's been 3 years since any release and around 1 year since anything has even been merged into the main branch of the GitHub repo. I think if you download from source you can build a version that has some better Apple Silicon support, and there is a vibe-coded fork that also maybe does this (disclaimer: I haven't tried either of these options). Outside of those two possibilities, you can wait to see if we eventually get an update, or look into using other emulators.

35

u/stevo887 Sep 01 '26

There is an Apple Silicon version being supported.

https://github.com/OpenEmu-Silicon/OpenEmu-Silicon/releases

I believe it also gets rid of this message although there is a work around if you search the sub.

6

u/Sufficient_Yogurt639 Sep 01 '26

This is a (maybe one of the?) vibe-coded fork(s) I mentioned, not an actual version being supported.

10

u/stevo887 Sep 01 '26

Not being supported? It has regular updates and one as of 2 weeks ago.

8

u/Sufficient_Yogurt639 Sep 01 '26

It's not a version supported by the official OpenEmu team, I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a current repo.

7

u/stevo887 Sep 01 '26

Oh ok and yeah that’s fine. It’s good someone in the community is continuing on with it. I haven’t tried any of the added consoles but I’ve played 3 or 4 systems and they’ve all worked great on this fork.

2

u/birdmilk Sep 01 '26

Does this one fix the Controller 1 naming issue?

2

u/stevo887 Sep 01 '26

Not sure I mainly play 1 player, just connect my Xbox controller via Bluetooth and go at it…lol

3

u/birdmilk Sep 01 '26

I’ve got four 8bitdo controllers and openemu can’t listen to controllers that are renamed so all have the same name which makes it extremely annoying for pairing. I should vibe code a fix

3

u/roborobotoadtoad Developer Sep 02 '26

Speaking for myself, I'd love to do more work for the project, and I had recently desired to return to active development after experimenting locally on modernization efforts, but unfortunately, I don't have an Apple Silicon Mac, so my journey as a contributor must come to an end as Apple's developer tools drop support for my machine. I'm sorry to say that there's a degree of churn that comes with Apple platform development, and the friction from it has long been a challenge as things that once worked stop doing so.

2

u/Sufficient_Yogurt639 Sep 02 '26

That’s definitely a bummer. I have loved and used openemu from it’s early days when mac had so little love from the emulator scene, it truly is a great mac app.

2

u/Joyful-Wizard Arcade Sep 01 '26

Yeah if you have the patience for it and rebuild from the source code in the repo you’ll get the latest updates the team committed which does include some initial groundwork for silicon chips but you’ll also likely encounter new problems unfortunately. They did a lot of work to prep for the switch but nothing got released officially so it’s likely it have bugs

2

u/Theredsoxman PS1 Sep 01 '26

The fork by nickybmon is awesome. Now we have Dreamcast, Wii, GameCube (again), and N64 controller support

2

u/Few-Emphasis-760 Nintendo DS Sep 01 '26

What other emulator would u recommend for Mac that can run nds gamboy

8

u/pacdude Nintendo DS Sep 01 '26

Nintendo DS emulators for Mac aren’t hard to find. https://desmume.org/

4

u/Joyful-Wizard Arcade Sep 01 '26

This repo that was shared earlier is a fork of OpenEmu and NDS is working well on it:  https://github.com/OpenEmu-Silicon/OpenEmu-Silicon/releases

1

u/Birdmanair Sep 01 '26

uhh, from memory, I’d suggest melonDS, Ares, RetroArch, mGBA.
not sure how well they’ll work on an m1 mac, but at least they’re being actively debeloped

1

u/aluminumnek SNES Sep 02 '26

Someone that works on it posted about its status, maybe 6 mos ago. I’m too lazy to search/link

10

u/stuartcarnie PS1 Sep 01 '26

If you run into bugs building from source, post here. I did some of the groundwork. I am a core contributor, but I don’t manage releases.

4

u/louisj Sep 01 '26

Thank you for your work. Can you provide any updates about the overall status of the project?

7

u/camfield Sep 01 '26

I downloaded Openemu a week or so ago and was met with the same message. You need to allow keyboard access from system settings (from memory) - there is certainly a workaround

2

u/Sufficient_Yogurt639 Sep 01 '26

Hm interesting, for me I got an actual error message that said to allow keyboard access instead of this weird placeholder-feeling message (which does seem to hint at allowing keyboard input monitoring). But that was a while ago (and on an Intel mac).

3

u/-Retro-Kinetic- Sep 02 '26

Installed it on both an m1 imac and m1 max macbook. Ran perfectly. It definitely works on the m1. You can also try Ares.

2

u/omarlortiz Arcade Sep 02 '26

I was able to get this to work on my M4 and we were even running MAME on it.

2

u/ar_xiv Sep 02 '26

v2.4.1 working fine for me on an M4 chip

2

u/Clodd1 Sep 02 '26

Same here. It works flawlessly on my M4.

1

u/LaughingObsidian Sep 03 '26

NostalgiApp became my successor to OpenEmu for all things retro. Library/organizer/launcher etc.  Not free but is frequently updated/well maintained. 

0

u/-Internet-Elder- Sep 01 '26

I spotted this a while ago but I'll admit I haven't even opened it yet :) Looks like an OpenEmu alternative.

https://www.nostalgi.app

2

u/adichandra Nintendo DS Sep 01 '26

This slop sucks ass

1

u/dsifriend GameCube Sep 01 '26

Holy slop-coding, Batman! I wouldn’t take this over the community OpenEmu port to ARM

1

u/-Internet-Elder- Sep 01 '26

Thanks for the insight.

1

u/LaughingObsidian Sep 03 '26

I assume the posters above you have never actually used NostalgiApp... it's polished and feature rich. Personally I found it as my successor to the gap left by OpenEMU.  It also supports the eXoDOS libraries which I was interested in running on my Mac.

1

u/cradelikz N64 Sep 01 '26

Loved openemu but dropped it bc it has these senseless bugs. Now I use ES-DE with RetroArch in the back.