The Best Emulation We've Ever Seen On An An Arm CPU! M2 Mac Mini Is An EMU Powerhouse

Ratchet and Clank: The Cleanest PS2 Emulation

I've been running ratchet and clank on my PS2 emulation setup, and I have to say, it's looking incredibly clean. The game is running at 4096 by 3584 pixels, which is by far the cleanest PS2 emulation that I've ever seen. If I had this in front of me and didn't know what was going on, I'd be convinced that it was a remastered version for PS3, and then I'd take it over to one of my favorite racing games, Gran Turismo 4. The difference really does make a huge impact.

I'm actually interested in coming back to this and getting some 4K real footage at a very high bit rate, so you can see what's going on. Right now, we're running at 5120 pixels by 3584, which is still quite impressive. I think this will give you an idea of just how clean the emulation is.

The next game I wanted to take a look at was God of War 2. We're still using the Metal back-end, but I do get a few dips every once in a while, and even if I go down to 1080p, I'll notice it dip into the mid-40s for a split second before coming right back up. I'm not exactly sure what's causing that issue, so I need to spend some time messing around with the settings to try and fix it. There is definitely hope that we can iron out this bug, but for now, it's just something to keep an eye on.

Finally, I wanted to test some PS3 emulation using rpcs3. If you're familiar with the simulator, you know it's multi-platform – Windows, Linux, and Mac. And over on the website, they state that it works on Intel-based Macs with a decent GPU and ARM-based Macs. I downloaded it, installed it, got everything set up, and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of these games run very well on the M2 Pro chip in my Mac Mini. Don't expect full speed God of War 3 at native resolution, but games like Tekken 6 at 720p are running smoothly.

One thing I want to note is that even with the M2 Pro chip in this Mac Mini, we're only utilizing about five of its ten CPU cores for Demon Souls and other games. This is because some PS3 games require more cores and threads than others. For example, Skate 3 can be notoriously difficult to emulate due to these requirements. I've tested both Demon Souls and Skate 3 with rpcs3, and while we're getting full speed on the former, the latter is still experiencing issues with bugs popping in.

In terms of emulation on the new M2 Mac Mini, this device is putting out some great performance, but we're not quite at parity with Windows yet. While I'm excited to see how these chips will impact PS3 and other games in the future, it's clear that more developers need to jump on board if we want to achieve true compatibility and smooth gameplay on Mac OS.

If you're interested in learning more about the M2 Mac Mini or want to see how it performs with different emulators, I'll leave some links in the description below. I also have a full PC gaming video planned that will explore how this device handles parallels, Crossover, and native Mac OS gaming, as well as Apple Arcade. If you're interested in seeing that, be sure to hit the Subscribe button and turn on notifications. And if you've got any questions or feedback, let me know in the comments below – it's always appreciated!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso yeah Full Speed PS3 emulation on the new M2 Mac Mini is pretty impressive if you ask me I mean it's definitely a big upgrade from the M1 champ hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at some emulation on the brand new M2 Mac Mini now I've actually been really excited about this because if you're a regular viewer of the channel you know over here we love Arm CPUs and we also love mini PCS this is kind of jammed both of them together and we've got an arm-based Mini PC of course it's running Mac OS but there are ways around this we could use parallels to run Windows 11 on it but in this video we're going to be testing out some high-end emulation in Mac OS on the new M2 Mac Mini and there's really no denying it I mean given that this is an Arm based system these do put out some really great performance even if you're not a big Apple fan you got to give it to them because they have done a great job with these Apple silicon chips the overall design hasn't changed from the last M1 Mac Mini and personally I didn't pick one of those up because I was really waiting for the next generation and here we have it this one actually has the M2 Pro and we'll take a look at the specs in a second round back we've actually got quite a bit of i o because given the form factor here we've got two full-size USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports a 3.5 millimeter audio jack full size HDMI 2.1 for Thunderbolt 4 ports and we've got four of them here because this is using the M2 Pro chip the regular M2 only has two it's usb4 Thunderbolt four and it's using 40 gigabit protocol we've also got gigabit Ethernet and our power input apple is offering a few different models of the Mac Mini and this one here has the M2 Pro 10 core CPU we've got six performance cores up to 3.7 gigahertz and four efficiency cores up to 3.4 it's also got a 16 core Apple GPU 16 gigabytes of unified RAM and this is LP ddr4 6400 and a 512 gigabyte SSD none of this is upgradable that's how Apple does it it's kind of just like a cell phone nowadays like I mentioned in this video we're going to be taking a look at the emulation performance but I do have a couple more videos planned if you're interested in seeing anything else running on this just let me know in the comments below one thing that I really want to get into is some PC gaming on this chip but let's go ahead and jump right into it alright so here it is been up and running for a little while now and I've got a bunch of emulators installed that we're going to be testing out there's several different ways that we can actually get these up and running you could use something like crossover or even parallels and run Windows but I want to run everything natively in Mac OS so that's exactly what we're going to be doing in this video and what you're seeing on screen right now is known as open emu this is specifically designed for Mac OS it comes in really handy it's basically an emulation front end and it works out great for the lower end emulators but there's not a lot of configuration that we can do at least when upscaling but you know if you wanted to run your favorite N64 games and things like that I would highly suggest trying out open emu and one of my favorite things about this whole emulator is the controller configuration menu as you can see from this drop down here it'll give us you know the picture of the controller we want to map and from there we can click on the corresponding button map it to our physical controller and we're ready to go like I mentioned it's a drag and drop system and everything is really easy to set up with this but it doesn't support the higher end stuff like PS2 and even Wii U so we're going to go with those Standalone emulators but first up we're going to start out light here and go with some PSP using the Standalone version of PPSSPP and the reason I'm going to be using the Standalone versus something like open emu is uh we've got the ability to upscale and with the M2 Mac Mini we can upscale all the way we can go to 10x with every single game that I've tested and I'm going to be using this 8-bit do controller if I can I need to turn it on I can't see this led it's already mapped ready to go with the Mac Mini there we are I've also gone through and tested a lot of these games with different back ends we actually have access to Vulcan and opengl and it really doesn't matter what back end you're using because all of these games run great first up we've got Tony Hawk Pro Skater uh Remix 2 and we're at 10x so if I head back to the menu I'll show you if we go to settings we're using the opengl backend and we're at 10x resolution with everything we're going to be testing that's what we're going to be set out now this is only a 4k monitor so it's still a bit Overkill but I wanted to show you that it will run these games at full speed maxed out with the Standalone version of PPSSPP and another thing to keep in mind is this emulator isn't specifically designed for this M2 Chip it's actually the x86 version so we're using the Rosetta translator that apple is set up and you know if we ever get an arm-based version for Mac we could get better performance but the way it is right now whether you want to use opengl or Vulcan we can Max this emulator out on the N2 chip I mean this is some great performance chains of Olympus 10x opengl no problem at all to run this game at 60. FPS is up in the top right hand corner and these God of War games are really the go-to test so as long as the game's compatible with the PPSSPP emulator you're going to be able to run it at full speed next up we've got some GameCube and Wii emulation using the Dolphin Emulator and the dolphin team has done a great job with these arm base Macs this is designed for either Intel or arm base Max and we can actually access the metal back in we're going to go to 4K but we could go to 5K if we want to it's just kind of overkill for the display I have right now first one we're going to be testing here is F0 GX on the hardest track to emulate fire field metal back end 4K 60fps and over in the top right hand corner I do have the FPS and speed listed as you can see I mean this stays at a constant 60 FPS and if you're not familiar with the metal back end or metal API this is specific to Apple think opengl or Vulcan but it's really designed by them to run their games in kind of a different way than Vulcan and opengl perform works great with these arm chips and of course since we're testing GameCube games we had to throw Rogue Squadron 2 at it this is a go-to test for a lot of people and it does give you know higher end systems a run for its money when it's upscaled right now we're still at 4K with that metal back in and it's running like a dream on this M2 Mac next thing I wanted to take a look at was some Wii U emulation using simu now with the latest updates to sim you over on their GitHub we do have a Mac version this is going to be the experimental version but this is made for x86 Max ones with Intel CPUs not specifically designed for These Arm based Macs but it'll still run with Rosetta and I have run into some issues now I was able to get breath of the wild up and running at 30 FPS but once I shut it down I couldn't get it to start back up it always crashes on me I've tried clearing the cash out and everything like that just can't get it to run again so yeah there are issues right now with Wii U on these Mac systems using simu but there's games that do run at full speed and function really great we're going to start out here with Mario Kart 8 and once the shaders are cached this is a really decent experience now I'm using the Vulcan back end but unfortunately On These Arm based Macs we cannot use async Shader compilation mode so we kind of have to wait like the old day days on Windows and cache those shaders manually hopefully down the road we do get an arm-based version of this because we've got more than enough power to play Wii U games on the M2 Chip be it the regular M2 or M2 Pro here's Bayonetta 2 FPS is up at the top left hand corner but we are working with a few graphical glitches if you take a look at the ground we've uh we've got some weird stuff going on so yeah you will run into issues with simu on these M2 or M1 Max right now and it really comes down to just using Rosetta to run these chance and the final thing we're going to be taking a look at is some PS2 emulation I'm going to tell you right now this actually blew me away to run these we're going to be using Aether sx2 if you head over to their website in their development section you can download the Arm based Mac desktop version it's going to run natively on the M1 or the M2 chips and we're going to go up to 8X resolution using the metal back end I'm going to tell you right now I've done a lot of PS2 emulation on a lot of different systems and it's never looked this good we are getting some absolutely amazing performance out of the M2 Pro chip when it comes to PS2 emulation I'm not sure how well this is going to come across on camera and then upload it to YouTube but if you take a look in the top left hand corner I've got everything we need to know about this system right now the resolution we're running ratchet and clankcat is 4096 by 3584. this is by far the cleanest PS2 emulation that I've ever seen I mean to tell you the truth if I had this in front of me and I didn't know what was going on I'd say that this was a remastered version for PS3 and taking it over to one of my favorite racing games Gran Turismo 4 really does make a huge difference um I would actually like to come back to this and kind of get some 4K real footage at a very high bit rate so you can see what's going on but I think this will kind of give you an idea this is running at 5120 pixels by 3584. really cleaned up this Gran Turismo 4 game in the final PS2 game I wanted to take a look at was God of War 2. we're still at 8X with the metal back in but I do get a few dips every once in a while and even if I go down to 1080p I'll notice it dip into the mid 40s for a split second then come right back up not exactly sure what that's about need to spend a little time messing around with the settings but you know there's a chance we could fix that damn either way look at it the game is playable here at 8x the last thing we're going to be testing here is some PS3 emulation using rpcs3 if you're familiar with the simulator you know it's multi-platform Windows Linux and mac and over on the website they state that it works on Intel base Max with a decent GPU and armbase Max and to my surprise downloaded it installed it got everything set up and a lot of these games run very well on the M2 Pro chip now don't expect a rotten God of War 3 at full speed on one of these M2 CPUs but uh you know something like Tekken 6 at 720p Vulcan back in runs at full speed I've got the built-in frame counter on and I'm going to minimize this because I want you to see that this is really running on this Mac Mini very surprised by the performance and remember with the M2 Pro that I have in this Mac Mini we've got the 10 core version so we've got 10 CPU cores but with this game here and Demon Souls we're only utilizing about five of those cores now as a lot of you might know there are harder to emulate PS3 games that require more cores and threads something like Skate 3 comes to mind but uh real quick we'll go with Demon Souls this natively ran at 30 FPS and we've got it here I'm very surprised that we're getting Full Speed PS3 emulation on the Mac Mini I mean this is actually really awesome and everything that we've tested so far has worked quite well a lot of the issues that we've run into with some of these emulators really comes down to compatibility a lot of these emulators that do run on Mac were designed for x86 CPUs like the Intel CPUs that Apple used to use we're using the Rosetta translator here so it's not running natively on arm but over time I mean a lot of these bugs can be ironed out now with PS3 I was really hoping that we were going to get full speed Skate 3 this is my go-to test I mean this really does tax that CPU but as you can see I ran into a lot of issues it is running at 60fps but it's unplayable because uh stuff keeps popping in we've got all those black textures going I've tried several different settings from within rpcs3 and I just can't get these bugs ironed out just yet so far when it comes to emulation on the new M2 Mac Mini this thing is putting out some great performance but we don't have the compatibility that we would have with Windows when it comes to a lot of the higher end emulators hopefully in the future that changes and you know with the power that these Apple silicon chips are putting out I really do hope that more developers jump on board but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about the M2 Mac Mini I'll leave some links in the description and I do have a full PC gaming video planned I want to see how this thing performs with parallels and we could also use crossover we could do some native Mac OS gaming some apple arcade I'm really interested to see how gin should impact runs on this device so if you're interested in seeing that make sure you hit the Subscribe button and think about turning notifications on and if you've got any questions let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchingso yeah Full Speed PS3 emulation on the new M2 Mac Mini is pretty impressive if you ask me I mean it's definitely a big upgrade from the M1 champ hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at some emulation on the brand new M2 Mac Mini now I've actually been really excited about this because if you're a regular viewer of the channel you know over here we love Arm CPUs and we also love mini PCS this is kind of jammed both of them together and we've got an arm-based Mini PC of course it's running Mac OS but there are ways around this we could use parallels to run Windows 11 on it but in this video we're going to be testing out some high-end emulation in Mac OS on the new M2 Mac Mini and there's really no denying it I mean given that this is an Arm based system these do put out some really great performance even if you're not a big Apple fan you got to give it to them because they have done a great job with these Apple silicon chips the overall design hasn't changed from the last M1 Mac Mini and personally I didn't pick one of those up because I was really waiting for the next generation and here we have it this one actually has the M2 Pro and we'll take a look at the specs in a second round back we've actually got quite a bit of i o because given the form factor here we've got two full-size USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports a 3.5 millimeter audio jack full size HDMI 2.1 for Thunderbolt 4 ports and we've got four of them here because this is using the M2 Pro chip the regular M2 only has two it's usb4 Thunderbolt four and it's using 40 gigabit protocol we've also got gigabit Ethernet and our power input apple is offering a few different models of the Mac Mini and this one here has the M2 Pro 10 core CPU we've got six performance cores up to 3.7 gigahertz and four efficiency cores up to 3.4 it's also got a 16 core Apple GPU 16 gigabytes of unified RAM and this is LP ddr4 6400 and a 512 gigabyte SSD none of this is upgradable that's how Apple does it it's kind of just like a cell phone nowadays like I mentioned in this video we're going to be taking a look at the emulation performance but I do have a couple more videos planned if you're interested in seeing anything else running on this just let me know in the comments below one thing that I really want to get into is some PC gaming on this chip but let's go ahead and jump right into it alright so here it is been up and running for a little while now and I've got a bunch of emulators installed that we're going to be testing out there's several different ways that we can actually get these up and running you could use something like crossover or even parallels and run Windows but I want to run everything natively in Mac OS so that's exactly what we're going to be doing in this video and what you're seeing on screen right now is known as open emu this is specifically designed for Mac OS it comes in really handy it's basically an emulation front end and it works out great for the lower end emulators but there's not a lot of configuration that we can do at least when upscaling but you know if you wanted to run your favorite N64 games and things like that I would highly suggest trying out open emu and one of my favorite things about this whole emulator is the controller configuration menu as you can see from this drop down here it'll give us you know the picture of the controller we want to map and from there we can click on the corresponding button map it to our physical controller and we're ready to go like I mentioned it's a drag and drop system and everything is really easy to set up with this but it doesn't support the higher end stuff like PS2 and even Wii U so we're going to go with those Standalone emulators but first up we're going to start out light here and go with some PSP using the Standalone version of PPSSPP and the reason I'm going to be using the Standalone versus something like open emu is uh we've got the ability to upscale and with the M2 Mac Mini we can upscale all the way we can go to 10x with every single game that I've tested and I'm going to be using this 8-bit do controller if I can I need to turn it on I can't see this led it's already mapped ready to go with the Mac Mini there we are I've also gone through and tested a lot of these games with different back ends we actually have access to Vulcan and opengl and it really doesn't matter what back end you're using because all of these games run great first up we've got Tony Hawk Pro Skater uh Remix 2 and we're at 10x so if I head back to the menu I'll show you if we go to settings we're using the opengl backend and we're at 10x resolution with everything we're going to be testing that's what we're going to be set out now this is only a 4k monitor so it's still a bit Overkill but I wanted to show you that it will run these games at full speed maxed out with the Standalone version of PPSSPP and another thing to keep in mind is this emulator isn't specifically designed for this M2 Chip it's actually the x86 version so we're using the Rosetta translator that apple is set up and you know if we ever get an arm-based version for Mac we could get better performance but the way it is right now whether you want to use opengl or Vulcan we can Max this emulator out on the N2 chip I mean this is some great performance chains of Olympus 10x opengl no problem at all to run this game at 60. FPS is up in the top right hand corner and these God of War games are really the go-to test so as long as the game's compatible with the PPSSPP emulator you're going to be able to run it at full speed next up we've got some GameCube and Wii emulation using the Dolphin Emulator and the dolphin team has done a great job with these arm base Macs this is designed for either Intel or arm base Max and we can actually access the metal back in we're going to go to 4K but we could go to 5K if we want to it's just kind of overkill for the display I have right now first one we're going to be testing here is F0 GX on the hardest track to emulate fire field metal back end 4K 60fps and over in the top right hand corner I do have the FPS and speed listed as you can see I mean this stays at a constant 60 FPS and if you're not familiar with the metal back end or metal API this is specific to Apple think opengl or Vulcan but it's really designed by them to run their games in kind of a different way than Vulcan and opengl perform works great with these arm chips and of course since we're testing GameCube games we had to throw Rogue Squadron 2 at it this is a go-to test for a lot of people and it does give you know higher end systems a run for its money when it's upscaled right now we're still at 4K with that metal back in and it's running like a dream on this M2 Mac next thing I wanted to take a look at was some Wii U emulation using simu now with the latest updates to sim you over on their GitHub we do have a Mac version this is going to be the experimental version but this is made for x86 Max ones with Intel CPUs not specifically designed for These Arm based Macs but it'll still run with Rosetta and I have run into some issues now I was able to get breath of the wild up and running at 30 FPS but once I shut it down I couldn't get it to start back up it always crashes on me I've tried clearing the cash out and everything like that just can't get it to run again so yeah there are issues right now with Wii U on these Mac systems using simu but there's games that do run at full speed and function really great we're going to start out here with Mario Kart 8 and once the shaders are cached this is a really decent experience now I'm using the Vulcan back end but unfortunately On These Arm based Macs we cannot use async Shader compilation mode so we kind of have to wait like the old day days on Windows and cache those shaders manually hopefully down the road we do get an arm-based version of this because we've got more than enough power to play Wii U games on the M2 Chip be it the regular M2 or M2 Pro here's Bayonetta 2 FPS is up at the top left hand corner but we are working with a few graphical glitches if you take a look at the ground we've uh we've got some weird stuff going on so yeah you will run into issues with simu on these M2 or M1 Max right now and it really comes down to just using Rosetta to run these chance and the final thing we're going to be taking a look at is some PS2 emulation I'm going to tell you right now this actually blew me away to run these we're going to be using Aether sx2 if you head over to their website in their development section you can download the Arm based Mac desktop version it's going to run natively on the M1 or the M2 chips and we're going to go up to 8X resolution using the metal back end I'm going to tell you right now I've done a lot of PS2 emulation on a lot of different systems and it's never looked this good we are getting some absolutely amazing performance out of the M2 Pro chip when it comes to PS2 emulation I'm not sure how well this is going to come across on camera and then upload it to YouTube but if you take a look in the top left hand corner I've got everything we need to know about this system right now the resolution we're running ratchet and clankcat is 4096 by 3584. this is by far the cleanest PS2 emulation that I've ever seen I mean to tell you the truth if I had this in front of me and I didn't know what was going on I'd say that this was a remastered version for PS3 and taking it over to one of my favorite racing games Gran Turismo 4 really does make a huge difference um I would actually like to come back to this and kind of get some 4K real footage at a very high bit rate so you can see what's going on but I think this will kind of give you an idea this is running at 5120 pixels by 3584. really cleaned up this Gran Turismo 4 game in the final PS2 game I wanted to take a look at was God of War 2. we're still at 8X with the metal back in but I do get a few dips every once in a while and even if I go down to 1080p I'll notice it dip into the mid 40s for a split second then come right back up not exactly sure what that's about need to spend a little time messing around with the settings but you know there's a chance we could fix that damn either way look at it the game is playable here at 8x the last thing we're going to be testing here is some PS3 emulation using rpcs3 if you're familiar with the simulator you know it's multi-platform Windows Linux and mac and over on the website they state that it works on Intel base Max with a decent GPU and armbase Max and to my surprise downloaded it installed it got everything set up and a lot of these games run very well on the M2 Pro chip now don't expect a rotten God of War 3 at full speed on one of these M2 CPUs but uh you know something like Tekken 6 at 720p Vulcan back in runs at full speed I've got the built-in frame counter on and I'm going to minimize this because I want you to see that this is really running on this Mac Mini very surprised by the performance and remember with the M2 Pro that I have in this Mac Mini we've got the 10 core version so we've got 10 CPU cores but with this game here and Demon Souls we're only utilizing about five of those cores now as a lot of you might know there are harder to emulate PS3 games that require more cores and threads something like Skate 3 comes to mind but uh real quick we'll go with Demon Souls this natively ran at 30 FPS and we've got it here I'm very surprised that we're getting Full Speed PS3 emulation on the Mac Mini I mean this is actually really awesome and everything that we've tested so far has worked quite well a lot of the issues that we've run into with some of these emulators really comes down to compatibility a lot of these emulators that do run on Mac were designed for x86 CPUs like the Intel CPUs that Apple used to use we're using the Rosetta translator here so it's not running natively on arm but over time I mean a lot of these bugs can be ironed out now with PS3 I was really hoping that we were going to get full speed Skate 3 this is my go-to test I mean this really does tax that CPU but as you can see I ran into a lot of issues it is running at 60fps but it's unplayable because uh stuff keeps popping in we've got all those black textures going I've tried several different settings from within rpcs3 and I just can't get these bugs ironed out just yet so far when it comes to emulation on the new M2 Mac Mini this thing is putting out some great performance but we don't have the compatibility that we would have with Windows when it comes to a lot of the higher end emulators hopefully in the future that changes and you know with the power that these Apple silicon chips are putting out I really do hope that more developers jump on board but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning more about the M2 Mac Mini I'll leave some links in the description and I do have a full PC gaming video planned I want to see how this thing performs with parallels and we could also use crossover we could do some native Mac OS gaming some apple arcade I'm really interested to see how gin should impact runs on this device so if you're interested in seeing that make sure you hit the Subscribe button and think about turning notifications on and if you've got any questions let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"