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.

Comments

Not viable?

[bildstorm]

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.

open-source

[nempo]

Then open-source it so somebody else can continue to develope the emulator for the x86.

Maybe if it ever WORKED...

[John_Booty]

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.

Re:Maybe if it ever WORKED...

[X-Dopple]

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.

very sad, so very sad...

[Vidmaster_Steve]

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...

Quite an achievement

[jpatters]

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

[MobyDisk]

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

[johnjones]

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

PCSX

[Resident Geek]

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

Sony killed them (unfairly)

[LordKronos]

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.

Bleemcasted

[tantalus]

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.

Shot themselves in the foot?

[mattbee]

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 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 :-)

That'll be the day

[CaptainSuperBoy]

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.

For existing orders

[Vegeta99]

[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.

Re:Why bleem was not 100% compatible

[Sycraft-fu]

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.