EMULATOR REVIEW - BLEEM v1.0
| With all the hype about Bleem in the newsgroups and the attempts by SOny to ban the thing. Rob takes a look now at the software which allows playstation games to run on a PC - and better. We hope. | |
PLEASE NOTE - The screen grabs have been cruched down to save space so don't look as good as they do on the real emu. Just thought I'd check that you knew. Bleem! is an emulator of Sony's Playstation. Nuff said... Bye... (Oy - come back). Oh alright then I'll tell you a bit more about it. There have been a number of PS emus before (the most notable being the spiffy PSEMUPRO). But this one, despite the fact that it seemed to appear from nowhere, is better than the lot of them so far. I've only tried the demonstration version which is freely distributable. I was quite surprise when the software justs consists of 314K of executable and two TXT files. Also there were no complex set up options like other PS emulators. You just plonk a CD in and go! I had a large selection of black mag CD's from when I owned a real PS (before I blew it up!) so I popped one in and held my breath.
Once the CDs menu appeared I though i'd try to cock the emulator up by trying a non 3D game. I thought that perhaps this side of the PS would be emuated less faithfully. But as you can see in the above screenshot, the blighter worked first time and had a perfectly respectable frame update to boot. The other thing that shocked me was the CD music was being played (I never got CD music with the other PS emulators I tried!). There were no sound effects but that was because they had been disable for the demo version. I then tried to kill the emulator by bunging Cool Boarders in it. It was the only game that worked on PSEMU pro (it didn't like the mag CDs) but crashed after the first race. Also the intro, being full motion video - the bane of PS emulation. The intro appeared straight away in colour and with an update identical to how it should be. The frame update of the 3D downhill section was slower than PSEMU but then that used my 3DFX card. While the registered version of Bleem! has full Direct3D and GFX card options, the demo version used software rendering only. The update was still playable though and looked great in a window.
I tried to really put the emulator through it's paces then so I tried Tomb Raider. This too worked perfectly and it was nice to see Lara Croft bouncing about in a window. Of course, not everything works. Tekken II demo worked and played but the graphics on the characters were severely distoted. Polygons stretched off into infinity giving the game a frighteningly surreal alien look. The into played perfectly though. According to their website, Sony has been trying to ban this emulator in much the same way as Nintendo tried to end UltraHLE's reign of the N64 emulation market. I'm afraid that although I can see their point, these emulators should exist. Piracy of software is the only option of UltraHLE unless you go out and buy a copy of the cartridge when you download the game. With Bleem! the program only runs games from the CD rom drive and original Playstation black CDs work fine. I would recommend hiring a game or borrowing from a friend before you buy it because like just about every emulator ever mad, this doesn't play everything. Yet. Bloody good. 8/10 (will get higher when the incompatabilities go down, or is it just that my CDs were covered in crap) Coagulus / Rob |
