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Games Entertainment

Bleem's Gravestone Online 153

Posted by timothy from the but-old-emulators-never-die dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I just went over to Blue's and saw that Bleem is dead. What happened? Have the lawyers finally gotten to them?" Maybe they just got tired.
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Bleem's Gravestone Online More

Bleem's Gravestone Online

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  • I think Bleem Cast was what killed em, no money in being Sued by Sony..

  • Not viable? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bildstorm ( 129924 ) <peter@buchy.shh@fi> on Sunday November 18, 2001 @10:44AM (#2581002) Homepage Journal

    Working at Electronics Boutique, I can tell you that at least on Friday, we were still selling Bleem! products.


    However, looking at how few Dreamcast systems we're selling (we have two new ones left, and the rest are preowned), and how few new PS games are coming out, it really doesn't make sense. The only way to make money for them now would be to find a way for something like XBox to play PS2, PS, Gamecube, and Dreamcast games. But that would invoke serious ire.


    Bleem! was a great idea, and made great products, but perhaps the strategy just reached the end of its lifecycle. I wish the guys the best in whatever new ventures they pursue.

    • XBox emulating PS2? It's not happening.. Try getting your P3 733 desktop to emulate a 128-bit cpu plus two co-processors. Systems emulating other systems is a great idea though. With its standard PC-type hardware, The XBox is sure to get a MAME port as well as emulators for some of the older consoles, such as SNES. PSX emulation isn't out of the question, remember Bleem ran on less.
      • Yeah, there are already a million DCast->Other console emulators out. dcemulation.com --joshua
      • I'm not as convinced as you that emulating a PS2 on an XBox is impossible. I admit, it's pretty bloody hard, but it might be workable. The key is to realize that the XBox's GPU is can basically do everything the PS2's can, faster. If you could do instruction translation, maybe statically or JIT, instead of doing one instruction at a time, it might be workable.

  • open-source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nempo ( 325296 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @10:49AM (#2581013)
    Then open-source it so somebody else can continue to develope the emulator for the x86.
  • Bleem! was a great concept- PSX emulator on the PC for sale to the public. I saw those ugly yellow boxes in the local comptuer stores myself- it was enticing.
    However, other emulators came up. VGStation took Bleem!'s place on the top of the line quickly as it was more compatable. Then Sony sued...
    Bleem! stopped updating, and virtually abandoned the PC emulation market for something new- a commercial PSX emulator for the Dreamcast. It was a bright future, if it weren't for two things- one, only one game would work on it, and two, the DC was dying.
    The PS2 would never need a PSX emulator.
    The GC and X-Box were far away at that point. Bleem! had no choice but to slowly fade away. I guess they finally gave up.

    There are better PSX emulators now (ePSXe is considered by me to be the best)... but it is still sad to see someone in the Emulation community go away.

    Farewell Bleem!.

    • Bleem! made three emulation packages for the Dreamcast. EB still has 'em (unlees an emergency recall was issued), and people still buy them. The emulator for Metal Gear Solid has to be the best one out there, and I know a LOT of people have come in to get both since MGS 2 was released.

  • Maybe if it ever WORKED... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John_Booty ( 149925 ) <johnbooty@NOSPaM.bootyproject.org> on Sunday November 18, 2001 @10:51AM (#2581017) Homepage
    I was initially very excited about the PC version of Bleem!; I even pre-ordered it. Well, after getting my disc 6 weeks late because they screwed up the order (their fault) I finally got it and was disappointed. Even up to and including their final release, Bleem! on the PC was buggy as hell.

    Out of all the games I tried, very very few of them actually worked toally okay. I wasn't expecting perfection, but most times the graphics glitches were so significant that I didn't really consider the game playable. When I say "graphics glitches", I'm talking about texture corruption, 99% of the time. I had bought Bleem specifically to get higher visual quality out of these games (bilinear filtering, higher res, etc) so I wasn't as tolerant of graphics glitches as I otherwise might have been.

    Also, Bleem! for Dreamcast was just executed very poorly. For those who don't know, they originally planned to sell three or four "Bleempacks" that would each run 30-40 PSX games. I guess the idea was to get a limited number the games working *perfectly* on each disc, as well as to charge the customer numerous times. Alas, even that was unacheivable, and they had to create versions of Bleem! that ran only ONE GAME- they released Bleem! Metal Gear and Bleem! Gran Turismo.

    Sorry, but it was WAY too expensive. I'm not paying $20 or whatever for a graphical upgrade for a single 3-year old game... especially considering that they don't look THAT much better than the originals and even the enhanced versions were far surpassed by other Dreamcast games.

    Interestingly, Connectix's VGS emulator worked almost flawlessly with all the PSX games I tried, although it didn't run on NT/2K, and didn't support 3D hardware so the games weren't graphically enhanced at all. This is the emulator that Sony bought and then yanked from the market.
    • Quick note, I bought my GT2 bleem!pack for like 5 bucks.
    • I didn't mind the few graphical glitches that I encountered.

      I'm not a big console fan and my interest in Bleem! was to be able to play with one game I liked without buying a playstation. Bleem! worked perfectly well for that and I've never regretted making the purchase. SONY should thank Bleem!, since they got money for at least one PSX game they would have never gotten otherwise.
    • Bleem! (the PC product) failed because it was exploiting a niche market - there was a lack of quality PSX emulators waay back in 1999. IIRC, the PSEmu team quit working on the project over some spat and there weren't any quality emulators.

      Bleem! 'leaked' a demo to the public. Wow! It could play all the popular releases! I'd buy the real version!. Bleem! claimed this demo was unauthorized and ordered everybody to yank it. All the big sites (Zophar's) complied while all the smaller sites hung on to it.

      But when Bleem! was released, it *really* sucked. Many of its much-touted features (ability to play in a higher resolution, better graphics, better sound) were offset by the fact that many games had huge graphical errors, big slowdowns, and some wouldn't even play at all. Randy (the coder of bleem) blamed these problems on drivers and no, it wasn't the fault of Bleem. Never mind that if one had the latest up-to-the-minute reference drivers, Bleem still sucked ass. Bleem! promised frequent updates right on the box, but the last 'frequent' update was in:

      November 1999.

      Sounds pretty frequent. I mean, heaven forbid you should update the emulator to work with the latest games. When I pay for an emulator, I expect quality work, not the half-finished crudshow that Bleem! was. Bleem! was largely dead by the time ePSXe came out - ePSXe did all that bleem! could, and it didn't require that you have a CDKey and you could *get this* save states, unlike Bleem. And ePSXe was updated fairly frequently and had a better compatibility list than Bleem had.

      So, good riddance. When you release an emulator to the public, it had damn well better be good, and it had better be updated frequently.

      On an odd note, updating from 1.4 to 1.5a actually slowed down FMV playing. Bleem never bothered to rectify this.
      • ePSXe also requires that you have a copy of the ACTUAL PSX BIOS, making actual usage of ePSXe a rather grey area, legally.

        Bleem! was reverse engineered without access to any of the actual PSX hardware, hence their ability to win against SONY in court.

        However, you forgot to mention Bleem!'s other big problem... Playing games too fast.

        As I said before... I hope Bleem! sells the IP they developed to Microsoft. Would be justice for what SONY did to them.

  • Sad (Score:1)

    by festers ( 106163 )
    Doesn't anyone out there realize that I'm willing to pay for a quality piece of software that emulates my Playstation games on my computer? Sony? Someone?? The resolution enhancement alone makes it worthwhile to me. Guess I have to keep hoping ePSXe works some wonders...
    • Doesn't anyone out there realize that I'm willing to pay for a quality piece of software that emulates my Playstation games on my computer?

      (Bold emphasis mine)

      You do realize we're talking about Bleem! here, right?

  • Java? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Oshuma.Shiroki ( 232199 )
    My question is why all that javascript for just a black page? *shrugs*

  • very sad, so very sad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vidmaster_Steve ( 455301 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @10:56AM (#2581027) Homepage
    I typically don't cry at funerals, nor do I tend to make the hideously melodramatic display of throwing myself at the casket or sulking down to my knees in front of a loved one's tombstone whilst the rain pours down in sheets, soaking my trenchcoat and fedorah...

    But this, this my fellow emulaton fans, is a sombre occasion that even the most stoic and hard-bitten game journalist/aficionado would find a tear marching its slick trail down the side of his jaded, tightly-clenched jawline.

    "But Steve," you say "Bleem was a hunk of ass, I mean, it capped out at resolutions of only 800x600. Teh Playstation was w33k d00d. My Pentium 4 2 gig 0wnz! J00 are a pussy for crying like a little, broken-hearted girl over a stupid emulator."

    To which I reply emphaically "Shut your bleemhole, ass. Remember when Raine was buried in its cardboard casket? Not a dry eye in the goddamned house, you little prick."

    But you, you're always quick to berate and tear me down and hate, and hate you do... "Raine is still around, f00l. J00're a dumbfuck."

    Yeah, that's right. Raine was ressurrected via some strange, arcane voodoo ritual, slain again, raised from the eternal depths once again, then burned by superstitious and cowardly townsfolk, then thrown into a river.

    And that, baby, is why I weep. Not because Bleem died, not because Sony (god bless the 4 pin iLink...) is a horrid, evil corporate demon, but because I've drank about twenty whisky sours tonight, and are somehow still ambulatory AND lucid.

    Yes, we journalists lead a tough life, but its one that we've chosen, baby...

    • Re:very sad, so very sad... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're too cool and normal to be posting here.

      Everyone else is bitching because the webpage that Bleem! put up doesn't work in IE. The rest of the "Information Wants to be Free (since I don't want to pay)" leeches are bitching about how Bleem was imperfect and/or how the Open Sores emulators are better.

      As we can see, if it were up to them, all of us programmers would be made into their slaves, from the large corporations to even small companies like Bleem! I assure you, if it were an open source project that was on the same caliber Bleem! was that was abandoned today, Slashdot would be done up in black and the Linux dorks would be sobbing and blowing the snot out of their zit covered noses all day.

      Every day that I read this site, I can't help but think that Microsoft might actually have a point.

  • Quite an achievement (Score:4, Funny)

    by jpatters ( 883 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:12AM (#2581052)
    In a final achievement they managed to make a webpage that simply loads one picture, that only works in internet explorer. iCab and Netscape just show a blank page. This is quite a metaphor for their past performance.

  • Blank Page (Score:5, Informative)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:12AM (#2581053) Homepage
    For those who go to the site and get a black screen - it appears that the site only works on Internet Explorer. No big deal though, it has 100 lines of Javascript just to fade in a picture of a tombstone with Sonic the Hedgehog crying and placing flowers next to it. Semi-cute I guess.

  • sold to sony (Score:3, Insightful)

    by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:16AM (#2581057) Homepage Journal
    didnt they just sell their sole to sony ?

    sony pressed legal people on them and then smozed them and gave lots of money to help them on the agreement that they would not sell to silly consumers but help out developers

    what would you do sell a product or take sony's money ?

    regards

    john jones
  • I bought bleem for PC back when it was pretty new. I eagerly awaited new releases and followed bleem's progress for a while. But once they hadn't released any new updates for about a year, I kinda lost interest. But I did hear they finally released a new update a month or two ago, but I never downloaded it because I didn't have the time (nor did I really want to) register in order to download it. But now the only thing left on the site is that stupid picture, and I'm left wanting to download that final update I feel entitled to, being that I gave then $30 and never really got what I thought I was paying for. Do they have any plans to leave the updates available for download even for a little while?
    • ...formerly PSXEmu.com, and still the best source I know of for PSX emulation news. (No, I don't work there.) They don't have the bleem! 1.6 update online yet - they were linking to bleem.com - but I expect they'll put it up soon.

  • PCSX (Score:4, Informative)

    by Resident Geek ( 16074 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:26AM (#2581075) Homepage
    Bleem may be dead, but its spirit lives on in PCSX [freshmeat.net].

  • Sony killed them (unfairly) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LordKronos ( 470910 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:35AM (#2581082)
    I agree with those that say it was Bleemcast that killed Bleem, kinda. Its was actually Sony that killed them, Bleemcast just provoked them. But it is really sad they way they went. Sony may have won, but they did it extremely unfairly. Sony tried to stop them in court, but when the courts ruled in favor of Bleem, and Sony was defeated, they then went on to win the battle unfairly. Last year (when PS2 was extremely popular but in such short demand) Sony went so far as to inform retailers that if they carried Bleemcast, they might just coincidentally find themselves on the wrong end of the PS2 shortage (if you know what they mean). So, first they drained them to the edge of bankruptcy, then they cut off their revenue.
    • They should sell the IP to Microsoft or Nintendo. Microsoft would be the easiest though, since it was developed for Wintel and used DirectX. Would be poetic revenge for SONY to have driven the technology into the hands of MS.

  • Bleemcasted (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tantalus ( 466821 ) on Sunday November 18, 2001 @11:58AM (#2581124) Homepage
    The idea behind bleem was pretty cool. Instead of emulating the hardware, like Connectix Virtual Game Station (which incidentally required a hack of the ROM and gave Sony fodder for going after Connectix legally), Bleem took a look at the hard ware instructions as they were generated in the game and decided what instructions could best accomplish the same end on the PC. This allowed for much more streamlined code without the normal performance hit you typically see with emulated hardware.

    Bleem provided no anti-piracy protection (again, unlike Connectix VGS). They argued that the actual Playstation hardware was nominally difficult to hack. That if people wanted to pirate games, they were going to do it regardless of the protection they could offer. This is true, of course: try typing 'modchip' in your favorite search engine and you'll come up with nearly as many hits as 'porn'.

    I find it a little strange how Bleem did an about face in this regard when they shipped their Playstation emulator for Dreamcast. They have released Bleemcast packs that work with Gran Turismo 2 ($6), Metal Gear Solid ($10), and Tekken 3 ($9). None of these will work with a copied playstation disc. Moreover, their protection is good enough that the krackers that release a pirated version of almost every Dreamcast game have been unable to krack these Bleem discs. I think it likely they would have sold more of these if they had allowed for copied games to play. They certainly would have had a larger market, not to mention the time they would have saved in not creating an iron-clad protection for the discs.

    I agree with others who have said that this is a logical time for bleem to make an exit. Playstation's hardware was old when they first began, allowing them to emulate a very popular product with then-current hardware. I'd like to see them come out with something that allows x-box games to play on a PC, but i'm not holding my breath.
    • Moreover, their protection is good enough that the krackers that release a pirated version of almost every Dreamcast game have been unable to krack these Bleem discs.

      I've seen a release of Bleem! GT2. No word on whether it works; I bought the real thing. Too bad it sucks. Now I have a PS2 and GT3 and I never even think about playing GT2 on my DC.

    • "Bleem took a look at the hard ware instructions as they were generated in the game and decided what instructions could best accomplish the same end on the PC. This allowed for much more streamlined code without the normal performance hit you typically see with emulated hardware."

      That's probably why they had so much difficulty emulating things correctly. If I understand correctly (and I'm no PSX programmer) as more advanced games started coming out for PSX, they were using something close to pure assembly. Looking at the leap between first- and last-generation PSX games, it seems feasible.

      But anyway, such a high-level emulation approach might have had its disadvantages trying to emulate close-to-the-metal code, a place where a hardware emulator might shine?
      • Actually, the reason that an emulator is HARD to get 100% compatability is that there are BUGS in the hardware. Yes, when the hardware doesn't work acording to 'spec' then things get hard to emulate correctly. The earlier games are easier to emulate because they don't use all the features of the hw, since they are amost always programmed in a virtual enviroment anyway. (At least the PS one /two and Xbox were) The later games give all the programmers from the SONY library writers to the actually game programmers more time to write code that exposes all the bugs in the HW. They work around these bugs and when the bugs are not emulated, the games don't work correctly. You know, little things, like not clearing the Overflow flag after certain types of operations and stupid stuff like that.

        Anyway, my feelings on emulators are that they are fun, but in the end, it's not worth the time to make them. Where are the DOS emulators so that I can play any game in win2k? MS has one, but it only works most of the time.

        Only the truely hardcore are willing to put up with the problems inherent in emulators. And even then, they only do it because it's free to copy games. If you didn't grow up with games like SMB, Final Fantasy, River City Ransom, then you are NOT willing to pay 30-50 bucks for them.
    • Bleemcast does work with copied PSX titles, I know Gran Tourismo 2 works. The reason this capability is there was apparently Sony has a patent on its copy protection system used in the Playstation. If Bleem had implemented that functionality, they would have lost in court due to patent infringement.
  • Does anyone know why they only made INDIVIDUAL GAME DISKS for Bleemcast?! I believe the MGS Bleemcast disk was only $10 at EB, but I'm not going to pay per game! Even if it were a 10 disk set for $100 (the same price as a PSOne), I still woulda bought it just to be able to play higher-res versions of many many PS games on my DC. Instead I bought a PS2 and the DC sits gathering dust (not that it wasn't already dying). Maybe next year when the other "next gen" consoles get a reasonable number of games, for now it's a PS2 world.
    • Bleemcast was going to be a series of discs, each able to emulate around a dozen or so games (I believe this was even reported on /. when Bleemcast was first announced long, long, long ago.) I think there were to be 2 or 3 discs. Obviously the problem with this is that you could potentially end up buying all the discs to get to the one or two games you wanted to play, and after you threw in the cost of the (never released?) Bleempod, you might as well of bought a PS1.

      I suspect the switch from multi-game discs to single game discs was the result of two things: 1: Bleem missing their deadline (no big surprise there.) 2: Bleem in desparate need of cash.

      Bleemcast was like a year late, and during that time, there were no new versions of Bleem PC, even though the 1.5 versions all had major problems with the one game that was promised to work - Final Fantasy 8, not to mention the countless other games that just plain didn't work. I took this as Bleem's way of saying "Thanks for your support, now bugger off." to their PC customers.

      In the meantime Sega announced the demise of the Dreamcast. This certainly didn't help Bleemcast any... So my guess is Bleem just took the few games they'd gotten working, and released single discs for each of them.

      So, bye-bye Bleem, bye-bye Bleemcast. You once told me to bugger off. Don't expect me to shed a tear for you.

  • Shot themselves in the foot? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mattbee ( 17533 ) <matthew@bytemark.co.uk> on Sunday November 18, 2001 @12:06PM (#2581143) Homepage
    Slashdot didn't cover the last few months of Bleem's existence when their web site detailed the news that Sony were trying to shaft them by threatening stores stocking their products with withholding of PS2 stocks (this was last Christmas). This was after they had successfully defended an attempted injunction by Sony to stop them selling Bleem! for PCs; so after failing to stop Bleem by legal means, they semi-successfully hurt them by traditional strongarm tactics.

    However I don't think they made the most of their martyr situation with regard to the Dreamcast Bleem port they had. Firstly, I think the whole idea of selling it as 'Bleempaks' rather than a warts-and-all 'complete' emulator was flawed; if you don't know, they decided that they wanted to sell the emulator on several separate CDs costing a few dollars, each of which would pay 20-odd Playstation games that were guaranteed to work perfectly. Their line was that customers would know exactly what they were getting and wouldn't be disappointed when a game they hadn't tested didn't work. What it looked like was a short-sighted attempt to boost sales by potentially splitting somebody's PSX library across all these Bleempaks, and making them pay more for it. I sent them an email [soup-kitchen.net] to this effect at the end of last year, and had no response.

    But I've since been convinced otherwise; from what I've heard, despite the fact that it was impressive at what it did, PC Bleem was never particularly reliable or compatible, even with the latest update which they stated would be the last. And this might explain why Sega weren't more supportive at the time when the Dreamcast was in its death-throes; sure a Playstation compatibility CD would give the console a shot in the arm, and if Bleem could successfully take on Sony's lawyers, surely Sega could, and then some? It seems likely that the same quality control problems which the PC Bleem! owners have witnessed would explain why they've only been able to release two single-game compatibility products for the Dreamcast so far, let alone a complete emulator or even a single 20-game Bleempak that they had planned.

    Obviously this is total speculation, as nobody ever saw any other games working under Bleem!cast. Even if it were true, I wouldn't blame the single Bleem programmer for not being able to get the whole product done & tested, start-to-finish, while simultaneously fending off Sony's lawyers, working (apparently) from home and still trying to have a life. I'd even heard it was written in 100% assembler which makes the job even more fearsome.

    Ah well, I guess that means the PS2 stays on my Christmas wishlist :-)

  • For some shameless karmawhoring, I made a mirror [pandora.be] of the Bleem! homepage [bleem.com] without all the javascript, so it is visible with any browser.

    Don't expect too much from it!

  • They had just released these new products I had every intention of purchasing. Christmas is just around the corner! When we find out abou the DC Emu scene we all went out and bought dreamcasts, thats about 11 of us. Then we found out about bleemcast, and beer flowed like water, now theyre out of business. Damn them i say! Ill write an email, maybe we can convince them to open source, just as long as sony doesnt buy out the company....grr.
  • I think Sony lawyers certainly played a big part in killing the company, though Bleem were over ambitious too, but you gotta give these guys credit for sticking in there. I think at the end of things the company was a fraction of its former size, just a few guys working out of their homes off their own cash.

    They made a lot of PR screw ups which left a fair few gamers bitter at them (just read some of the comments on the Blues News site). First they left Bleem! PC in a buggy state to move to Bleem for Dreamcast (Bleemcast). Then, having said they'd do Bleemcast packs supporting 100 games each, they ended up doing packs supporting just one game each. But then who can blame them, getting *perfect* emulation along with drastically improving the visuals of the games takes a while even for a single game, especially as every Bleemcast plays every copy (US, EUR, JAP) of that game on any region's Dreamcast, and I'd rather perfect emulation of some games than poor emulation of many. As is they've emulated the only three PS1 games I liked (MGS, Tekken 3 and GT2) and did a great job of it too, so I've no reason to complain about them.

    Being over ambitious and getting screwed by Sony lawyers... I'm amazed they survived this far, poor guys. Ah well, thanks to them amongst the last few great Dreamcast games are, strangely, PlayStation ones. That's not a bad legacy to leave behind.

    - icemind
  • Want to know what killed Bleem!? It as Bleem!. Those guys were trying to be a viable software company by selling a Playstation emulator. Earth to morons, console gamers that can afford enough games to make Bleem! worth buying already had a Playstation by the time Bleem! hit the market.

    Bleem! was bitten by their own product being, well, lame.
    • I bought the three Bleemcast releases because I don't have a PlayStation, not because I can't afford one, but because I don't want one, especially as after five years I think it's way overpriced (it must cost them a pitance to produce now yet it still costs the same as the technically superior Dreamcast), not to mention that I have little respect for the business practices of Sony. I may be in the minority in my appreciation for Bleem's efforts, but then they were a pretty small company so, were it not for Sony and their legal action, they could well have survived as a small company targeting a niche market of gamers like myself.
    • How about buying it so you can play your PSX library on a laptop on a plane?

  • For existing orders (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vegeta99 ( 219501 ) <rjlynn@@@gmail...com> on Sunday November 18, 2001 @01:57PM (#2581353)
    [12:59:03] *** Now talking in #bleem
    [12:59:03] *** Topic is 'bleem! and bleemcast dead. Existing orders will go out'
    [12:59:03] *** Set by Cerlyn on Sun Nov 18 00:50:55

    The channel is on EFNet, btw.
  • Check this out..on the 5th I emailed Bleem because their ordering system was fuxored. I couldn't download the betas so I emailed their sales guy (literally ONE guy). He just now got around to emailing me back with the betas. Here is the full body of his email:

    Better late than never.... and I mean NEVER...

    This company....er.... message... will self destruct in 5 seconds...
    david

    Funny as hell.
  • bleem! repeatedly stated that warez was killing them, each new release they would have some new copy protection that would soon be broken. A good deal of people who did use bleem! probably aquired it illegally.

    I never personally tried the bleemcast! (for dreamcast), but considering there are so many games that are so cheap for the Dreamcast now it simply wouldn't even be worth it to pay for just one PS game on the DC. On top of that, the system required putting in the bleem! cd, starting the DC, then taking it out and putting in the PS disc, all quite a big hassle.
    • Bleem warez?

      Who'd be so pathetic as to go through the problem pirating something that *doesn't work*?

      I paid for the thing with the hopes that the team would continue to make improvements to it. This was the case until they announced Bleemcast...

      Fortunatly I'd bought a real PSX by that time.
  • I'd like to try out the software and see if it was worthwhile or not.

    Any place I can get a copy?
  • Wouldn't we just all flip out if in a months time the page had a picture of sonic giving birth to Bleem II.

    LD
  • We have this lawyers.

    You die now.

    Death To Competition
    Death To American Dream
    Abusing Corporate Power Is Great!
  • I was going to buy bleem.

    any day now

    yah

    right

    errr. . . .

    Oh wait, PS1s are selling for less then copies of Bleem! DOH!

  • Bleem themselves made a good explanation of why they were not 100% compatible. You can find it here [207.71.8.31]. Instead of emulating the Playstation(tm) hardware exactly, they opted to use native x86 code to mimic known Playstation functions they could decipher.

    In order to support all Playstation(tm) functions and be 100% compatible, you must know everything the Playstation can do. Keep in mind there are at least four Playstation models, each with their own quirks. Bleem either (1) would have to reproduce Sony(tm)'s hardware and software exactly (very difficult and legally risky) or (2) mimic everything they figured out with completely new code. They did the latter, which in theory has better results over the long run but caused problems in the short term.

    A few vendors likely used their own libraries instead of Sony's, making their life difficult. Just using basic statistics, one can see it is easier for bleem to support one game under these conditions than 400 or even 40.

    It sad to see bleem go. Besides the fact they were actually challenging the rights of a large firm to deny others the rights to make a compatible product, their court case would have been a modern confirmation of our rights to reverse-engineer. Without such a case, the DMCA and SSSCA may reduce engineering education to textbook theory and looking at encrypted singals with equipment that cannot decode them.

    • The problem is there are other, free, emulators out there that do what Bleem does only better. ePSXe [epsxe.com] is the best one that comes to mind. Hard to charge for something that people can get for free.

      Also, Bleem had a big problem in that the programmer wrote the WHOLE THING in 100% assembly. Ok, maybe that was cool in the Amiga days (that's what he used to program) but now it's just a bad idea. Windows API calls aren't any faster in ASM than in C++ and are a whole lot harder to work with. Had Bleem been rewritten as a C++ program with a few time critical things (like processor emulation) written is assembly it would have lost, at most, 5% or so speed and been a lot easier to maintain.

      I know some people that got Bleem and were pissed because updates came out infrequently and really didn't fix all that many problem. The problem was that being written in all assembly made it a huge bitch to change and maintain. Had the bulk been C++ (or whatever HLL) I think it would have been much easier to maintain and update.

      Last I saw, ePSXe seemed to be more compatible and ahve less glitches than Bleem. I find it unsupprising that Bleem died given that.
  • You guys all seem pretty harsh on bleem!. I live in England, and we can't get bleem! over here; on my last visit to the States, I was very happy to see it unexpectedly sitting on a shop shelf, and I'm even happier now that I bought it.

    I took it home and played Gran Turismo straight away (and pretty darn nicely) on my clunky old AMD 500. Whoo-ee! :) Plus, when I tripped over to the website, it didn't seem that out-of-date.

    I, for one, give bleem! a most hearty salute. They battled in many lawsuits against a huge company and came out tops each time; they did grand at a VERY tough job on emulating the process involved inside a PSX, and not specifically the output. The options were plentiful and the majority of things worked very well. Not at all a bad way to spend some US$ in my opinion.

    If you think you can do better, then why aren't you?

  • It has a bit more, shall we say, description. Bleemdirect.com [bleemdirect.com]
  • Bleem turned their back on their customers. A few months after Bleem! was first released they closed their message boards and we didn't hear anything from them for a year. They broke their silence with the Bleem! for Dreamcast announcement, and refused to respond to their customer's fears that Bleem! PC would be discontinued. To make things look alright they threw up a new website, sans information and message boards, and basically shut themselves off from the rest of the community. Their attitude was basically "If you're not ordering a product, we don't want to hear from you."

    At first I was loyal to Bleem!. I sent every game registration card to Sony with the word Bleem! written across it in highlighter. I even went so far as to E-mail the corporate bastards. Nevertheless, Bleem! would not stand by their product and responded to complaints and criticism with a cold shoulder. In that respect they were even worse than Sony.

    On top of that they chose to emulate on the Dreamcast and charge $9.99 per game. That was a huge stab in the back for their PC audience. They locked themselves into a niche market and the rest of us just left. The Dreamcast is dead or dying, and so is Bleem!.

    They got what they deserve.
  • Resistance is futile...you will be assimilated.

    What you say?

    Someone set up us the bleem.

    We get signal.

    How are you gentlemen?

    You have no chance to survive, make your DL.

    You are on your way to lawsuit.
    It is you.

    Take off every copy protect for great justice...
  • I just saw that on techtv to. what about bleamcast? i kinda figured it wouldn't be out after the dreamcast cancelation. to bad. I luv dreamcast!!!! did they ever officially declare it dead? i read several interviews and articles on it.

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