Bleem!

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bleem!
The interface of the discontinued bleem! emulator
Developer:	bleem!
Latest release:	1.6b / August 16, 2001
OS:	MS Windows, Dreamcast
Use:	Emulator
License:	Proprietary
Website:	www.bleem.com (dead see mirror)

bleem! was a commercial PlayStation emulator released by the bleem Company in 1999 for IBM-compatible PCs.

[edit] History

In the infancy of PlayStation emulation, bleem! was incredibly advanced for its time. The authors made repeated claims that it was coded in machine language, and although later they admitted it was actually assembly[1], the only difference is readability of the code. Unlike other PlayStation emulators of the time (including Connectix's commercial Virtual Game Station), it made better use of a PC's 3D graphics hardware and had a variety of filters used to make games look better than they did on an actual PlayStation console. Emulators at that time primarily used software rendering, with plug-ins for 3D cards still being buggy. Bugs plagued bleem! as well, with all but one game (fittingly enough One) being plagued by major bugs according to bleem's own compatibility charts.

To combat software piracy of the small downloadable emulator, the user had to buy the bleem!-CD. A CD containing about 35 MB with a DirectX distributable and the actual version of bleem! available at the time of the CD's printing. The rest of the CD was only for copy protection and was impossible to copy with conventional means; however the copy protection was cracked nevertheless within two weeks of the release.

Further updates to the emulator were free, until the company ceased operation several years later, due to lawsuits from Sony among other problems. eBay auctions of some of the company's possessions were held soon after - including a huge library of worldwide game releases apparently used for compatibility testing.

Since bleem!'s demise, other PlayStation emulators such as ePSXe have surpassed bleem! in terms of hardware support and features; however, some of these emulators still require a dumped version of the PlayStation BIOS to function, while bleem! does not. PCSX is one of the newer freeware PlayStation emulators that do not require a BIOS to operate.

Bleem! was also released in 3 other versions for the Sega Dreamcast called Bleemcast! to play the most popular PlayStation games Gran Turismo 2, Metal Gear Solid and Tekken 3.

Bleem used low-level memory emulation and other risky technology. It did not function on operating systems using the Windows NT kernel, including Windows 2000. In fact, Bleem!'s statement at the time was that bleem! would never support running on Windows NT-based systems, as Windows 98 was the dominant operating system at the time; many users feel that this decision also signaled the end of bleem!.

Users wishing to run bleem! on unsupported platforms would require the use of virtualization software, such as Virtual PC or a VMWare product, to run a compatible operating system, such as Windows 98, inside of their existing system. A simpler (but still nowhere near simple) alternative would be to dual-boot with a compatible operating system, or to install one on an older computer.