Playstation Emulation On The Dreamcast

martial writes: "I saw the information on IGN; it seems that the people at Bleem! are going to release a DreamCast version of their software to play PC Playstation Emulator."

Comments

political issues - DVD, anyone?

[Deadbolt]

What a lot of people here may not know/realize is that we have a very, very good reason (those of us with DCs, anyway) to come out in strong support of bleemcast. Sony sued bleem!, over and over again, trying to bankrupt them, because they were losing control of their media. So they tried to stop bleem!'s release on the grounds that the programmer had reverse engineered it and in doing so had violated a slew of Sony patents and copyrights.

Sound familiar to anyone? How about Jon Johansen? The bleem! case is VERY applicable to a lot of us because bleem! WON their case against Sony. That case may come up as a precedent in the inevitable DVD lawsuits. In fact, I'm surprised the EFF lawyers didn't mention it when DeCSS was yanked.

In any case, even though bleem! is proprietary software (sorry :), we should support it and back it up with money. The company has shown grit and stamina in fighting the good fight. I'm sure many of us would like to emulate (pun intended) their successes against the evil corporations. Put $30 behind bleem! or bleemcast. It contributes to a good company with our interests at heart.

Works a little differently than PC Bleem...

[ClassicG]

One bit of worry earlier about the DC version of Bleem was the fact that you can't patch or upgrade a console program like one for the PC, and that the compatibly from the PC version (good but relatively low) would carry over and that there would be no way to improve it later.

But with the announcement of the 'bleempack' technology, each of which will be having support for 100 games, a theroy has emerged of how Bleem will get around this problem. Basically, Bleemcast will not be like the PC version - one single emulator, with balanced optimizations made to make as many games as possible run reasonably well. Instead, it is believed that each bleempack will contain one hundred versions of the emulator, each one specially tweaked to run one single game as faithfully as possible.

To my knowledge, this type of console emulation (multiple versions of the emulator, each tweaked specially for a particular game) has only been done once before - a Gameboy emulator for the Atari ST. I'm looking very forward to seeing how it turns out, and I suspect that this might be what finally gets me to get a DC for myself.

Phillip Morris, Nike, Microsoft..
For such crimes against humanity and depraved indifference

Emulation, oh boy oh boy

[Brento]

Somehow this harks back to OS2. The minor player in the market brings out "emulation" of the leader's last-generation platform. Sure, it works, but at that point, who really cares? People who buy Dreamcasts aren't going to get excited about the ability to play Playstation games when the Playstation 2 is already out.

(I know Bleem has nothing to do with Sega, so the IBM analogy doesn't really hold.)

I hear the comment already - you're saying, "But then I can upgrade and still keep all my Playstation games." What's the point, speedy - if you already have a Playstation, then you don't need the emulator. Why pay extra to play something you've already got?

Heck ya

[SirPhreak]

I was on the phone with a bleem rep today (I work at dreamcast.net) and he told me the actual product will be released within a couple weeks and everything will debut at E3, so check out dreamcast.net for the latest on this.... This should be very sweet, playing games like GT2 and the final fantasy games with some graphical enhancements on the dreamcast. Im sure going to enjoy it

No It Doesn't :)

[Ian Schmidt]

The Dreamcast can run Windows CE, but WinCE is in no way, shape, or form "under the hood". It resides entirely on the game disc and boots from there if the game uses it. Otherwise the Dreamcast is 100% Microsoft-free.

Here's an idea.

[Elvii]

Anyone thought of an emulation-based box? Probably not possibly ATM due to tech and licsense reasons, but a console that could play NES/N64/PSX/PS2, dreamcast, etc, would be neat. The price on something like that, thou, is something I'm not even gonna think about. :) Nor am I going to wonder how to run cart and cd based games pratically on a system like this.... it's just an random thought. Back to perl now, oh well..

bash: ispell: command not found

Re:This is interesting...

[Rew190]

... But you're forgetting that we haven't heard anything from Sega yet; we don't know if they support Bleem or not, just because Bleem for DC exists doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that Sega supports it. After all, Sony was pissed at Bleem... But to my knowledge, Sega hasn't said anything about this new software yet. If they have, can someone provide a link?

short some buttons?

[bbk]

As anyone who has used it knows, the dreamcast controller does not have the secondary trigger buttons that are on a playstation controller, or one of the dual shock's analog sticks (which are far better than the "rip the skin of your finger" stick on the dreamcast).

Aftermarket controllers anyone?

This is interesting...

[Shaheen]

This is actually kinda cool. I was actually going to buy a PlayStation at one point to play games like Final Fantasy VIII the way they were supposed to be played - on a console where the resolutions are right.

I have a Dreamcast, and this type of thing just made my day. It seems that Sega really knows where to go in this age where they know the following invariants about console gaming:

• Their console will be obsolete in about a year
  
• The games it can play will be thrown aside along with the console
  

That's it. However, Sega seems to be taking the right direction. By supporting emulation of games, Sega is showing that older games are a viable source of revenue, even if it's a pittance compared to what they used to make, it's still something. Also, it might even revive a market for a long dead console. How many of us have wished for a good old Nintendo or Genesis after playing some of our favorite games in an emulator?

I like what Sega is doing, and I'll definitely be on the preorder lists for Bleem! when it comes out for Dreamcast

Also, for more E3 spectaculars (such as a WarCraft III trailer and PS2 news), check out dailyradar.com