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Sony Hiring Emulation Experts?
Thanks to TotalVideoGames for their article indicating that Sony are hiring an 'Emulator Development Engineer' on their Japanese website. According to TVG, the move "..fuels speculation that the PlayStation 3 will indeed run PSOne and PlayStation 2 titles", though it could equally be for the handheld PSP or, well, a red herring. But the site still boldly claims: "It's an ironic situation however and re-ignites the debate between Bleem! and Sony; for those who missed out on the multi-million dollar law-suit, Sony successfully muscled Bleem! from the market for selling emulated PSOne titles for the Dreamcast."
Well, Bleemcast had one perk - so far as I know, the graphics were better on Bleemcast than on a PS2 running a PS1 game. Sony was probably just sour that someone might *gasp* provide a better experience than them, without interfering with their product at all.
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
I mean, Sony could want to get as many bugs and issues identified as soon as possible before go and start finalizing the hardware designs and making a bunch of prototypes. I imagine being able to emulate a PS/3 on existing X86 desktops or other already easily accessible existing hardware would be useful, especially OS developers.
To think that Sony would try to incorporate something in their next generation system that was key benefactor to the success of the PS2. If anybody doubted that the PS3 would be at least partly backwards compatible they have been smoking too much crack. Backwards compatability sells systems.
Remember in soviet russia PS2 plays you.
Bleem LLC -never- sold emulated PSOne titles for Dreamcast. Bleem sold an emulator, and you still had to get the game elsewhere. Since Sony's complaint with Bleem was that it used copyrighted code to check for original discs, Bleem simply made their emulator capable of running CD-rs as well.
Had Sony bought out Bleem, it probably would have been cheaper for both parties, and more than likely would have been more than a little profitable.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
...that Bleem! wasn't the only commercial emulator for the PlayStation out there. (And Bleem! existed for platforms other than the Dreamcast, too. As another poster noted, Bleem! was available first as a software package for the PC, and worked quite well.)
The other commercial emulator besides Bleem! was none other than Connectix's excellent Virtual Game Station, which was cross platform. Virtual Game Station was first demonstrated and sold on the Power Macintosh, then ported to Windows. Sony had more success hassling Connectix legally (many speculated that Bleem! did a better job doing a clean room reverse engineering job on the PlayStation), but ultimately what killed VGS was Sony settling out of court with Connectix. Part of the settlement was that Sony got the rights to VGS, and Connectix stopped selling the product themselves.
Sony made vague rumblings about updating VGS and bringing a better version to market, but really all they were interested in doing was sitting on it.
Sony did everything they could to kill PlayStation emulation, but all they succeeded in doing was driving the emulator writers underground and promoting OpenSource solutions; the proprietary commercial offerings from Bleem! and Connectix were squashed through legal pressure and back room deals.
Is anyone else suspicious of Sony now trying to hire emulator writers? I wonder if this is a honeypot to entrap emulator coders and rake them over the coals (legally speaking)?