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Bleem's Gravestone Online
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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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.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Then open-source it so somebody else can continue to develope the emulator for the x86.
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
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!.
--- Ãther SPOON!
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.
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The problem with VGS was that Sony and Connectix signed a deal to work on future emulation software. All that seems to have resulted from that is that Connectix have stopped VGS. Whether it was a case of "We want to work with you" or "OK so we lost in court but if we give you this big bag of cash will you stop selling VGS?" only Connectix and Sony really know.
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 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.
...Randy always said he'd love to get another coder on the job, but it'd be more trouble than it was worth. Not quite a perfect candidate for OSS development.
(Sure, there *are* OSS projects that use ASM, but...)
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.
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.