Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2003 9:24 pm    Post subject: A few words about the beta

Hi, I'm Rod and I worked at bleem programming the DC version with Rand. I haven't posted here before but I thought it was important to clarify a few things about the beta that has been doing the rounds.

The beta is an extremely early version of bleemcast. Nothing has been modified by whoever has distributed the image, this is simply bleemcast at 30% completion.

This beta in fact predates the E3 show where bleemcast was first announced. For those doubters keep in mind we demo'd Ridge Racer 4, Omega Boost and Gran Turismo 2 at E3 in May 2000. These were selected because at this stage of development the ingame graphics were perfect for these games. Certainly there were no texture problems (grey polys), or rearview mirrors drawing crap everywhere. Otherwise you'd have heard it reported by those who attended at the time :)

A full year of development continued on after E3, with the first bleempak released in May 2001. A significant amount was acheived in this time with speed, compatibility and features.

I can understand why people like seeing a whole range of stuff running. It gives you a glimpse of the promise we saw in the emulator, and why we decided to invest the time to push the DC hardware to its limit. It's a shame however that people are now seeing something that differs so much from the final product. An emu where GT2 chokes as soon as multiple cars are on screen, and where cars run into walls in the replay theatre. MGS doesn't boot, and Tekken 3 gets nowhere close to the 60fps of the bleempak.

If you haven't yet seen the GT2, TK3 or MGS paks do us a favour and check them out to see how good emulation can get. I know you can't buy the bleempaks anymore but maybe you can find a friend who has them and is willing to lend them for a while.

Our definition of perfect is a lot different to those who are posting to the compatibility listings ;)

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:08 pm    Post subject:

There were *NEVER* any beta versions that were released -- this one was an early version that was NOT released, but was leaked by an internal beta tester almost a year ago.

This build was from May 2000 ... which makes it almost three years old now, and a full year difference from the actual released product.

No versions were ever "distributed" -- they were sent, under NDA, to beta testers for testing.

Yes.

Considering that it's the result of a total of roughly four months' work (including a move to LA, Comdex, and figuring out the DC) it's not too bad.

Timewise, the build is only 25% of the final MGS and TK3 builds, and 30% of the GT2 build.

It isn't a "port", and nothing was reused from the PC version, save for the knowledge gained during its development -- for a whole variety of obvious reasons.

I agree with Rod completely: So many things are missing, unimplemented or buggy, it's a shame that people are seeing it in this state.


BTW, some mod should fix Rod's "banner" ... his should match mine.

Last edited by Rand Linden on Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:19 pm    Post subject:

It was an immense amount of work that was quite difficult -- the DC certainly didn't make things easy... nor did a whole host of other "issues".

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 2:20 pm    Post subject:

Firstly thanks to those who have enjoyed the bleempaks and offered kind words!

Yeah, bleem is dead. DC too. But just because it would be provided free would not prevent any legal consequences.... which is a pretty good reason to start with :)

I agree that distribution was far from ideal, but it wasn't realliy impossible to get ahold of. EB and other stores were selling online.

These betas were used for internal testing right throughout development. Obviously there were a lot of them, but none are meant for the public. As far as I know this is the only leak.

bleem has been dead for so long that it really doesn't matter now. I'd say the word is disappointed, but this is directed more to the staff member who leaked it in the first place. bleem was a small company, so everyone knew everyone. It's a shame one of our own was willing to screw over the rest of us, but you get that in life.

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 3:08 pm    Post subject:

It depends what people take away from it.

Those who have played with the bleempaks are able to put the beta in perspective. Those who haven't can't.

I think the most important thing that the bleempaks showed was that it was possible to run the flagship titles perfectly on entirely different hardware. Not only that but you could run them in higher quality and at higher speeds in most cases. In short, it was possible to offer a better experience for the games that you had purchased. This isn't evident from the beta because of the significant bugs and features missing from all games.

Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 12:44 am    Post subject:

Sony sued whoever they perceived to be a threat. We never thought we were one (rather that we helped by opening up their software to a greater market). If you think that Sony would have dropped their suit because bleem decided to go free/open source you are gravely mistaken.

So why were we in court for 3 years then?

Rand did bleem PC on his own (it was before I joined). So you can blame all the bugs on him ;)))

I think it's safe to say that we'll never work on any console emulation ever again.

I could never get it out of Rand I know he was going to tell everyone when a certain milestone was reached. Unfortunately we fell just short.

I did find out what a lot of the other acronyms stood for though, and can say it's probably for the best that we don't know :)

The code is copyrighted so you can not legally distribute it without permission. I can't give you that permission. I don't know who has the rights to the bleem program now (whether it's rand, david, banks etc.) I would not recommend hosting any illegal material as it may give another party an easy way to shut your site down.

The thing that we completely underestimated was the time it took to test the games thoroughly. It qucikly became apparent that it would take years to play 100 games with the staff numbers we had.

What we really needed was a way to update the software in the future. That way we could do light testing and address any serious problems if they cropped up. Unfortunately having no hard drive on the DC made this impossible. It was an oversight that saw us having to play through all possible parts of the game to ensure 100% compatibility.

To give you an idea, the full testing of the numerous versions of GT2 took around 2 months.

Because not all games were 100%. We couldn't realease a program that might crash 3/4 of the way through a game, with no way to update it in the future.

The performance of PSXDC is about in line with what I would expect for an emulator written in C. The processor in the dreamcast is only 200mHz, so for high speed you really need to have the majority of the core written in asm.

Last edited by Rod Maher on Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:30 am, edited 1 time in total

Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:22 am    Post subject:

That the beta is in wide circulation doesn't change the fact that we're not going to discuss technical details -- Please don't ask.

Rand.

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2003 8:22 pm    Post subject:

There've been a few silly posts with regards to source/newer betas. Neither can ever be released. Period.

It would be a lot of work to get the speed up. It's not just a matter of converting to asm (that's what a C compiler does), but more in changing your architecture to match the DC hardware. The quality is going to be dependent on their core, so I can't speculate about it.

Only PC and DC versions were in development. I don't know what other platforms bleem would have ended up on if the company continued.

This is not true unless the sole purpose of the product is circumvention. The DMCA is not intended to prevent competition (although a lot of companies are trying to use it in this regard).

It depends on where you live. Here in Australia modchips are legal for dvd's and consoles because of the illegal territorial lockouts implemented by the manufacturers.

Actually this was the intention (to focus on all the hit titles). We showed off the FF9 bleempak on the site, but the company folded before it was released.

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2003 8:12 am    Post subject:

bleem is dead.

Let it be.

Rand.