iDevGames has announced the uDevGames 2011 Macintosh game development competition will begin on July 1. There’s serious prize money across several categories up for grabs, so professional, hobbyist, and beginner developers alike should check it out.

After two years without a news post, the Residual team gave an update on their progress in late April. Residual is a fork of the ScummVM project that aims to support LucasArts’ 3D adventure games Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. Grim Fandango is now listed as “completable with a few minor glitches” on the compatibility list. Daily snapshot builds are provided on the Residual downloads page.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

Apple released updates to its iMac line earlier in the week, bumping performance with the latest Sandy Bridge processors and AMD Radeon HD graphics cards. The new iMacs also sport ports -- one in the 21.5-inch models, two in the 27-inch -- for the new Thunderbolt high-speed peripheral connection interface that was introduced with the new MacBook Pros earlier in the year. Tested did a breakdown of the gaming capabilities of the new iMacs, determining that the best choice for many gamers will be to get the 21.5-inch model with a 6770M graphics card.

Apple also released the long-delayed, much-anticipated white iPhone 4 last month. If I may editorialise for a moment, the excitement over what is only a colour change is utterly ridiculous -- it almost makes me ashamed to be an Apple fan.

Arcade emulator MAME has a new project manager. After six years at the helm, Aaron Giles, a legend in the emulation scene, has stepped down to make way for Angelo Salese. Giles will still be involved as a developer on the project, however. The latest version of MAME and its OS X port, SDL MAME, is 0.142u2, which as usual offers a wealth of source changes. See here for the list. Head over to the SDL MAME website for a precompiled version, or grab the source straight from the MAME site.

Super Nintendo emulator Snes9x has received a long-awaited update. Version 1.53 offers a wealth of fixes and improvements, which you can see in the changelog listed here. Downloads are also available at the preceding link.

Nintendo Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin now has official Mac OS X builds. The emulator is updated on a more-or-less daily basis, so keep a close eye on its download page for the latest binaries.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

Editor's note: I'll admit I knew nothing of the Phantasie games before reading this, but jetboy does a great job of explaining the appeal of his favourite entry in the series. I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me what exactly I'm supposed to do in the game, though, because I went wandering and now I'm completely lost. -mossy_11

My favourite game of all time, Phantasie III, was released for the Amiga back in 1987, and I emulate it using E-UAE (in combination with a handy, legal, ROM/OS package called Amiga Forever). Since most Amiga games were distributed on floppies, I also use a utility called WHDLoad, which allows you to install the floppy versions on your hard disk and remove the nostalgic switching between 100 floppies process. This is my suggested setup if you want to play Phantasie III using MacOS as your host OS, because while there are other versions (notably DOS and Apple II), the graphics and sound for the Amiga version are unequivocally better. While I love Apple, the Apple II version is clearly the worst, and it just makes no sense trying to play it. If you really canʼt get the Amiga version going, I suggest you go with the DOS version because itʼs somewhere in the middle. [What about the Atari ST and Commodore 64 versions? -ed.]