Amiga emulation - especially CD32 emulation - is well what can I say "worse than on any other platform." The Amiga was a very versatile and well-known computer in its time with a lot of multimedia capabilities that you'll find on todays computers too. The OSX has sort of been left out in the cold when it comes to an easy to use emulator. If you want a quick and solid emulation experience you might opt to install Windows on your Mac and use the Windows emulators on that platform. But today I go back to OSX based Amiga emulation and I have discovered that there might be some more Amiga emulators out there for Mac OSX than I initially thought. Let's take a look at them:

E-UAE
Last news posted on the dev-blog dates back from 2007-03-27 so it has been quiet for almost a year now. The emulator is based on UAE, the Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator, with the emulation core based for a large part on WinUAE - ouch that might hurt Apple purists. The source-code that is available on the website actually builds and runs on other OSes to: Linux and other Unices, OSX, BeOS (wow!) and AmigaOS itself (double wow!).
To use it on OSX one needs SDL or X11.. Don't worry, the latter comes with the OSX install DVD and is easy to install. And you'll need the all important Kickstart rom images from a real Amiga, although the emulator does provide a rudimentary form of ROM-emulation making it possible to run some software without a real Kickstart image (nice!).
When the emulator starts you get a choice which configuration file you want to load. No configuration files are provided so you have to make up your own, selecting which features you want enabled so you resemble a configuration that matches the used kickstart as closely as possible. Very basic and very powerPC but perhaps quite usable. I am going to try to create various configuration files and try out a couple of games.
These are the configurations you need to be making in order to have something resembling real machines:
* a500.uaerc: 68000 processor, ecs, kick1.3, no acceleration
* a1200.uaerc: 68020, aga, kick 3.1, additional memory
* a4000.uaerc: no limits
Checking out the website I discovered that the latest version out there for public download seems to be a PPC binary :-(, this is not good news for Intel Mac owners as performance will be limited by the Rosetta PPC emulation layer.. Hmm the source codes are openly available so perhaps there is a x86 binary out there. But first let's download the PPC 0.8.29 binary and check it out. A little further searching with google turned up another website that provides a universal binary. On an Intel Mac you really need this as the PPC version is too slow, even on a 2Ghz Intel machine. The Hi-Toro utility is found on the same site and is not an emulator an sich but actually is a front end resembling WinUAE and it works well with E-UAE. Hi-Toro 0.5.0 Universal binary. Just download this and use it as a good front-end for E-UAE. The interface of the latter is just too basic. It's easier to create and maintain configurations. It does function, although I have trouble getting my USB joystick to work and be recognized, joystick emulation through the keyboard works without problems though. A good Amiga experience using ADF files. It is even possible to use a Harddrive OS/Workbench install very much like WinUAE is able to do. Although I must say that I find the WinUAE experience a whole lot smoother and faster than the Hi-Toro/E-UAE solution on the same computer!
I can be brief about the two other emulators that are out out there osXMess and sdlUAE. OSXMess is nice, but not easy to configure and use. Very much like the PC version of MESS. Not really for game-playing yet. And sdlUAE has actually converged with E-UAE. So in fact there only seem to be one OSX Amiga emulator left, E-UAE with a front-end Hi-TORO. Both apps have luckily been updated to universal binaries.

Conclusion: For now to me Windows seems to be the platform of choice when it comes to Amiga emulation, the front end of WinUAE is more flexible and the emulator does seem to execute slightly faster running in Windows on the same machine. If you have a Mac it is perfectly capable of emulation the Amiga 500/600/1200 and running disk based games through Hi-Toro/E-UAE though - you won't be left standing out in the cold without being able to get your retro-gaming Amiga-fix on OSX!