Low-End Gaming for the Apple Mac

My kid (see avatar) loves to play computer games. For the past few months, he's been playing emulated Game Boy games on the iBook he inherited from me when I upgraded to a MacBook. Seeing how he loves to play games, I decided to up the ante a bit -- I downloaded SNES9x and some ROMS and tried playing with old Super NES favorites.

But its a pain to play Super NES games using the keyboard (doubly difficult with laptop keyboard) so I stopped playing for a while. Then a discussion at my favorite internet forum has tipped me off that cheap gamepads can be used on the Mac. The gamepad they were talking about seems to be only available from certain retailers from TipidPC.So I headed on over to CD-R King and browsed if they have any inexpensive gamepads and I found a USB dual-controller and it only costs Php 220 (around $4). Since its quite cheap, I bought one and tried it. It took me a few tries and I wasn't able to make it work immediately. So I fired up Parallels and ran Windows XP and it worked on my Windows-based SNES emulator! It's a hassle to start up my Windows XP installation on my MacBook if I wanted to play but then again I bought cheap controllers so I have to live with the consequences.

But after a few days, I was able to make it work with SNES9x that runs on Mac OS X! Now I can enjoy low-cost retro gaming on my MacBook and it only cost me $4! It may have taken me a few days to figure out how to make it work but then again, the bottomline is I made it work! Now, who says Macs are not made for gaming?