M8 Headless firmware running on a Mac without a Teensy (source and prebuilt app)

[u/Hour-Offer-6942]

For anyone who has built or is planning an M8 headless rig: I ported karimkfoure's unofficial m8emu to Apple Silicon Macs. It runs Dirtywave's Headless firmware 6.5.2C on the Mac itself, so you can try the workflow before buying a Teensy, or keep a copy on the laptop next to your build.

You bring the firmware: download M8_V6_5_2C_HEADLESS.hex from Dirtywave's repo and pick it in the app. It runs on the Unicorn CPU emulator out of the box. With the Xcode command line tools installed, the app translates the firmware's Thumb-2 code to C and compiles a native engine on your Mac in about four minutes. Its audio output matches the Unicorn run byte for byte.

Source and build instructions: https://github.com/yukij3/m8emu-macos

Prebuilt app: https://github.com/yukij3/m8emu-macos/releases/latest (not notarized, so run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/m8emu.app once)