On a standard install, BizHawk defaults the Display Method to GDI+ and it will run ROMs just fine inside a VM. Lacking this information, and not wanting to install Windows via Boot Camp at that stage, I gave it a try… Performance will be considerably worse in a VM. It consumes about 40% CPU on my Macbook Air, running Windows 8 on bare metal (i.e. MarI/O takes several *days* to evolve a genome that can complete a single level.

Then I tried BizHawk inside a VirtualBox VM (I chose Windows XP). Attempt #3: VirtualBox VM Super Mario World (SNES) However on closer inspection it seems the project’s lua scripting branch has been abandoned. OpenEmu was the most promising OSX emulator since it threatened to also have Lua scripting capabilities. Since I couldn’t run BizHawk on OSX, what about a different emulator? I hoped all I needed was Lua scripting capabilities, and with any luck, very few changes to the API calls in a script, right? (Such optimism!) 'Sorry, Lua is not supported on this platform.'

Bizhawk emulator mac