20 June 2017

Erockus Arcade 4.0 and MacScene Emulation Forum

As suggested by some of you, I gave Erockus Arcade a try. I was testing the new version 4. Unfortunately my testing did not turn out nicely. Here is a short summary.

1. Erockus is a bare bones frontend without any screenshot or even video preview options. This can fit you if you want to just head for the games and nothing else. But for many of us, MAME is not just playing, but it is about preserving the original feel.

2. The Erockus configuration writes directly into your mame.ini and does not accept manual configuration (at least not of the options it directly handels). An existing mame.ini is backed up. This can be ok, if you are aware of it. 

3. However, after three starts, Erockus stopped working on my system with the latest MacOS Sierra installed. After a startup time of more than two minutes (full romset), it ends up with an error. In my last attempt for this post, Erockus just froze after 3 minutes without any message, so I had to Force Quit.

This is why I could not do any further testing, and I also cannot provide screenshots here. All in all, the software might be ok for your if you are looking for fast gameplay - if it works on your system. In my case, unfortunately.

I also want to mention the MacScene Emulation Forum this time, although I did not succeed registering for some reason ;-). If anybody of you has an idea how to register (is it still alive?), I would consider again. Thanks. One thing is clear: When it comes to emulation, Macs are still a rather difficult environment (to say the least)...