Can you provide any useful information?
What OS are you running? Is the Mono runtime installed?
sure my mac is version 10.6.8 (i hope that helps) and no i do not have mono runtime installed
sorry i have never used the mac version
Per the requirements listed in the first post, the Mono runtime (MRE) is required. It should prompt you to install it when it doesn't find it.
http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html
10.9 is a free upgrade for users of 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8, is it not something you're able to upgrade to?
I just loaded the current release in a 10.6.8 VM I have, and it didn't work. BizHawk 1.0.4a is the last version I've tested on 10.6. I'll try a few things, but I might need to updated the minimum requirement once I figure out how far you can go back. I've only tested on the latest OS.
Edit: It looks like the current release only works on 10.8 or later, using the latest Mono MRE. Some older releases from 2012 and 2013 might still work on 10.6 using Mono 2.1.0 (Stable release on the download page) but I don't know exactly when it stopped working. And older releases of BizHawk on OS X are kind of crappy. Unfortunately, I can't support older OS's easily because everything is built with current tools. So I would suggest using the Windows version with Wine, or upgrading to 10.9 if you can.
Edit 2: It just occurred to me exactly why 10.8 is the minimum requirement. BizHawk uses a few native libraries now (blip_buf for some kind of sound purpose, and genesis plus GX) and both I build using the latest XCode. The latest XCode only supports targeting 10.8 or newer, and unfortunately a version that can target 10.6 is not available for 10.9.
At one point I tried to set up Xcode in a 10.6 Virtual Machine, but for some reason it always failed to install even though the MD5sum on the disc image is correct and it's the same installer that I've kept a copy of for years and used fine natively long ago. I won't completely rule out trying again in the future, but at the moment I can't do it.
10.9 is a free upgrade for users of 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8, is it not something you're able to upgrade to?
i have really no clue with what to even do with this, my parents forced me onto MAC i used to have a pc but they threw it away.
does bizhawk have any n64 support yet?
I’m sorry. Really I am... I am so sorry for what I did. Forgive me.
10.9 is a free upgrade for users of 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8, is it not something you're able to upgrade to?
i have really no clue with what to even do with this, my parents forced me onto MAC i used to have a pc but they threw it away.
does bizhawk have any n64 support yet?
No. N64, SNES, and various Gameboy systems are not supported on OS X. They require some additional development work. In the case of SNES and Gameboy, it's been over a year since the last time I've tried but I ran into issues back then and haven't seen if they can be resolved yet.
The free upgrade to 10.9 is here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-mavericks/id675248567?mt=12
Unless you're specifically looking for TAS tools, if you just want a generic emulator to play games you should probably use OpenEmu since that supports N64, SNES and others. But that doesn't support 10.6 either, so you'd need to upgrade for that too.
oblivionwalker, I'm sorry for your loss. It's like taking away your bike and giving you rusty ice skates as substitute. I suggest you mow some lawns or something, basically your life is ruined without a PC.
Hi I'm running OS X 10.7.5 and I got BizHawk 1.6.1 to run pretty well except the video doesn't run smooth at all. I mean, the games run fine (looking at the frame rate) but it looks really laggy, making it impossible to do a TAS. I tried with both Genesis and NES. Reading through this thread I guess it's because I'm below the 10.8 minimum? Is this the kind of problem you would expect?
Hi I'm running OS X 10.7.5 and I got BizHawk 1.6.1 to run pretty well except the video doesn't run smooth at all. I mean, the games run fine (looking at the frame rate) but it looks really laggy, making it impossible to do a TAS. I tried with both Genesis and NES. Reading through this thread I guess it's because I'm below the 10.8 minimum? Is this the kind of problem you would expect?
If it works, you meet the requirement. :-)
Mono is supposed to work all the way back to 10.6 but it apparently does not anymore. All of the native stuff (Genesis Plus, QuickNES in the next release) is built with XCode, which on 10.9 only allows me to build binaries that are compatible with 10.8 or above. If they happen to work on an older version, that's great and feel free to use it, but it can't be certain that it should.
With regards to video lag, are you saying that the Video is behind the audio, or are you saying that it's skipping frames? Frameskip is on by default.
On my machine, (2008 Mac Pro, so not very new) if I run Genesis with "Audio Throttle" enabled and "Vsync" enabled, it appears to run at 60fps with perfect audio and sound. If I disable Vsync, the video sometimes tears or skips frames, but that's just normal because it's not synced to the display. I haven't ever seen the video lag behind the audio though. Some of the toggle menus on OS X won't update their checkmarks after you change them (it's on my list of minor things to fix) but they do take effect immediately and the next time you open the app the checkmarks will be in the right place.
Don't people doing TAS videos usually play in slow motion, frame by frame?
I hope VSync solves your problem, otherwise maybe there's some other detail I'm missing. The UI in the OS X version isn't great at this point, but it should be enough for basic use like you're trying.
With regards to video lag, are you saying that the Video is behind the audio, or are you saying that it's skipping frames? Frameskip is on by default.
No it's more like it repeats frames in short (~1 second) cycles instead of displaying the correct ones. I did try different frameskip and sync settings to no avail. Playing in slow motion doesn't help either, since it doesn't change the rate of those cycles.
I guess it's a Mono problem then? I might update the OS soon and see if it works better.
With regards to video lag, are you saying that the Video is behind the audio, or are you saying that it's skipping frames? Frameskip is on by default.
No it's more like it repeats frames in short (~1 second) cycles instead of displaying the correct ones. I did try different frameskip and sync settings to no avail. Playing in slow motion doesn't help either, since it doesn't change the rate of those cycles.
I guess it's a Mono problem then? I might update the OS soon and see if it works better.
It doesn't sound like anything Mono or the OS version would cause, but I'm also not sure why something like that would happen. I'll see if I can set up a 10.7 test environment and try myself to confirm if the OS version has anything to do with it.
I guess I could try it on some other macs as well, to see if the speed of the machine or the refresh rate of the display has anything to do with it. I've only tested on a 60hz monitor, maybe 50hz doesn't work right. I'll see if I can reproduce anything over the weekend.
Edit: Installed 10.7.5 in VMWare, but it runs almost perfectly for me. It took a long time to launch the application, but I can run Genesis with Audio Throttle, VSync On, 0 Frameskip, and it sort-of runs at 60fps. Every few seconds it will drop a frame or two as if Frameskip were on, but I think this is just the Virtual Machine's behavior. No 1-second stalls like you're experiencing. So the problem isn't 10.7.5.
I haven't tried other machines yet, but what type of Mac and what year are you using?
Hi, sorry for the long wait. The computer I used was a "MacBook 13-inch, Late 2009".
No worries though, I got myself a PC instead, and BizHawk is running fine :p
Hi, sorry for the long wait. The computer I used was a "MacBook 13-inch, Late 2009".
No worries though, I got myself a PC instead, and BizHawk is running fine :p
Glad to hear you found a solution.
One thing to keep in mind in the future.... I forgot to mention that you can install Windows on any Mac and dual boot with both operating systems. I do this myself, it's good for running games that aren't available on OS X.
Ok so i seem to keep crashing. every time i change settings, and i am wondering if anyone could add me on Skype so i can get a detailed description of what is happening,
(no spam intended)
I’m sorry. Really I am... I am so sorry for what I did. Forgive me.
Ok so i seem to keep crashing. every time i change settings, and i am wondering if anyone could add me on Skype so i can get a detailed description of what is happening
I don't have Skype.
Can you explain what you're doing? Not very many people use the OS X version, so any posts here could probably be helpful. The crash report text might be useful too, but probably not.
The first time BizHawk is started on OSX, it consumes 100% CPU time on a single core for approximately 60 seconds, before showing the main window.
Also after the first time starting the app, the native file select dialog refuses to accept focus.
The native OSX menu bar doesn't like to respond to clicks. It also contains menu items that should be disabled, like the debuggers; choosing one of these unimplemented menu items appears to do nothing. Choosing the menu item a second time crashes the application.
The screen flickers uncontrollably. The display configuration options don't seem to provide any solutions.
No controller inputs work. Configuration is default (keyboard).
I also have trouble with loading a NES ROM I wrote; when loading the .nes file, BizHawk shows a broken "Choose File From Archive" window: http://i.imgur.com/XdYJYY9.png The emulator happily crashes if I hit Ok in this window. The only way I can actually load the ROM is by zipping it. :\ Here's the ROM, zipped because it's tiny: http://www.kodewerx.org/tmp/test.zip
I was about to write a whole list of problems with OSX version of Bizhawk. Well I guess you beat me to it :( thank you but I am sad I did not get to write it.
I’m sorry. Really I am... I am so sorry for what I did. Forgive me.
The first time BizHawk is started on OSX, it consumes 100% CPU time on a single core for approximately 60 seconds, before showing the main window.
Also after the first time starting the app, the native file select dialog refuses to accept focus.
The native OSX menu bar doesn't like to respond to clicks. It also contains menu items that should be disabled, like the debuggers; choosing one of these unimplemented menu items appears to do nothing. Choosing the menu item a second time crashes the application.
The screen flickers uncontrollably. The display configuration options don't seem to provide any solutions.
No controller inputs work. Configuration is default (keyboard).
I also have trouble with loading a NES ROM I wrote; when loading the .nes file, BizHawk shows a broken "Choose File From Archive" window: http://i.imgur.com/XdYJYY9.png The emulator happily crashes if I hit Ok in this window. The only way I can actually load the ROM is by zipping it. :\ Here's the ROM, zipped because it's tiny: http://www.kodewerx.org/tmp/test.zip
Most of these problems are things I'm aware of. The OS X port isn't intended to be good, it's just intended to be usable. It really needs a native UI, which it doesn't have, and I haven't really improved the wrapper around the WinForms UI for the last 18 months or so.
I've seen the 60 seconds thing, but it only happened to me once and it wasn't obvious why. It was just frozen on some XML deserialization code to load the config, and after I let it sit long enough it never happened again so I assumed it was related to the fact that the first time I happened to me was after upgrading to one of the Yosemite developer previews.
Focus issue is worked around by switching focus away and back to the dialog.
The OS X Native Menu bar responsiveness is due to the butchery that I use to wrap WinForms inside of MonoMac. I was told I couldn't do it and it wouldn't be possible, but I went and did it anyway. The problem is that BizHawk runs entirely on the main thread, so I need to give it a few ms every frame to let the menus work at all. They're ok, but not great. Once again, a native UI would solve this. It's the same thing regarding menu states and updates. I suck the menu content out of the WinForms app and translate it to OS X menus when the app starts. I also trap the menu changes, but that doesn't cover everything. A lot of the menus in BizHawk update via an Opening event, which there really isn't an equivalent to on OS X. (Apart from Activated, which is the equivalent of the Opened event that occurs after the menu has already opened. Most BizHawk menus update before they open.) This is something that could be improved if I hook into some more calls, but never really went and did.
I've never seen any flickering issues before, both natively or in VMWare. Not sure what to tell you on that without some more details.
All controller inputs need to be configured in the control config dialog before you use them. The defaults are all based on the Windows key names, and many cases those defaults don't match the Mac key names. I didn't bother creating Mac defaults for the default config file.
The problem with tiny files I've seen as well. It's an issue with the library I use in the OS X version to read 7-zip and other archives. (The one on Windows invokes a native 7-zip implementation, for the portable branch I switched to a different one written entirely in .NET) BizHawk by default will ask the archiver if it believes the file you tried to open is an archive so it can decompress it. It misidentifies a lot of smaller files as being archives when they're not and tries to decompress them. This could be improved, I usually just load the compressed versions of games I know are misdetected.
In short, yes, there are a lot of annoyances when it comes to UI on OS X. I haven't really attempted to improve them in the past year or so, I've basically just tried to keep up with core changes for the last year and keep the code building and occasionally try to get some of the native cores building. Staying caught up was my main priority, I was hoping at some point that someone else would be interested in poking at it because building a brand new UI was a rather massive undertaking and if that were to happen it would have almost no chance of ever being in sync with Windows. That's the justification for the shitty wrapper, although I still was hoping to improve it at some point.
If you want it, you can always grab the source from the portable branch in SVN and use the completely un-wrapped WinForms UI. The menus and dialogs won't be native, but the UI will be slightly more responsive in some cases.
As I am a native mac OSX user, I feel like I would want to help improve the stability of the port, so may I help code and develop the Bizhawk version of mac. Maybe give me a free changeable version of Bizhawk that I can change native UI or layouts or even cores or something like that. I can even add in the N64 support for Bizhawk that can support DK64 even better than the PC version.
I’m sorry. Really I am... I am so sorry for what I did. Forgive me.
Sappharad, I was reporting the issues I experienced in case it could help with the development, even if it could just aid in prioritizing UX bugs. Unfortunately there's a lot on my plate (as always) and I'm not able to provide any support. The most I can do about the flashing screen is record a video. But that will just show a symptom.
Cheers
Sappharad, I was reporting the issues I experienced in case it could help with the development, even if it could just aid in prioritizing UX bugs. Unfortunately there's a lot on my plate (as always) and I'm not able to provide any support. The most I can do about the flashing screen is record a video. But that will just show a symptom.
Yes, I understand. Most of it hasn't been documented and I just wanted to be chime in as to the reasons for some of the rough edges. It deserves to be fixed but my time is spread between a lot different projects. (and a backlog of games I've bought and not played)
I've been trying to spend a few hours every Tuesday on the OS X port, but lately I've been stabbing in different directions each time and never actually finishing one thing. For awhile a couple of times I tried to get the mupen64 stuff ported and stashed away some partially adjusted but unbuildable code. A couple weeks back I started trying to get Lua working by upgrading to a newer Lua library that has support for OS X and Linux, but had some unusual runtime issues with that.
Yesterday I finally found where I put the native UI code that I had started on a year or two ago because this thread prompted me to give it another go. I figured that might be useful for at least basic functionality like playing games until other features are added as they're wanted. I didn't really do anything with it yet, but it's an option now. I've always been leaning towards the existing UI from windows though, because it just saves so much time.
So anyway, things still move, but there aren't really any priorities because I haven't gotten much feedback to drive that.
Download latest code from the portable branch.
1. Open BizHawk.sln in Monodevelop.
2. Click Build.
Any native cores (Genesis, SNES, QuickNES, Lynx, GBA, GBC, GB, N64, Saturn, etc.) will not work unless someone ports those to Linux.
Download latest code from the portable branch.
1. Open BizHawk.sln in Monodevelop.
2. Click Build.
Any native cores (Genesis, SNES, QuickNES, Lynx, GBA, GBC, GB, N64, Saturn, etc.) will not work unless someone ports those to Linux.
This won't work out of the box. You'll get error messages like:
Error CS2001: Source file `/home/testuser/bizhawk-read-only/Version/svnrev.cs' could not be found (CS2001) (BizHawk.Common)
You'll need to supply these files yourself.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
