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Bleem's Gravestone Online

Posted by timothy on 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.

9 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Blank Page by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Blank Page by GreenHell · · Score: 2, Informative

      For those who don't have IE and want to see the picture, try this link for it without all the javascript.

      --
      "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
  2. PCSX by Resident+Geek · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bleem may be dead, but its spirit lives on in PCSX.

    --
    Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
    http://smokedot.org/
  3. Re:JavaSCRIPT? by Anarchos · · Score: 2, Informative

    It fades in the grave picture if you're using IE.

    --

    "A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
  4. Re:Java? (repost with correct URL) by DenialS · · Score: 2, Informative
    It looks like they do a fade to or from black with a picture of a tombstone marking the birth and death of Bleem, but on Mozilla, at least, you just get black. I can't really blame them; writing and testing cross-browser JavaScript probably wasn't a high priority for the remnants of any of their remaining funds.

    Argh... the SlashCode still doesn't recognize URL-encoded text fields submitted by Mozilla, which is why I'm reposting this.

  5. That'll be the day by CaptainSuperBoy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Maybe if it ever WORKED... by X-Dopple · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. For existing orders by Vegeta99 · · Score: 3, Informative

    [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.

  8. Re:Why bleem was not 100% compatible by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem is there are other, free, emulators out there that do what Bleem does only better. ePSXe 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.