By: Mike Ponicki
August 15th, 1999

For those of you that don’t follow the console emulation scene, I’m not gonna’ go into the history of bleem. So, as a description, let me just say that it’s a Playstation emulator for the IBM PC that, in addition to a software renderer, can supposedly run games in Direct3D, with a compatible accelerator of course.

First, this article makes sense only if you understand that I don’t want to run the games in bleem’s software renderer. I have a real psx right next to me, why use an emu at all if it isn’t to make the games look up to date? And until recently, bleem really couldn’t run much of anything in hardware. Anyone who told you otherwise was full of it. I use a fairly typical setup, a RivaTNT with Nvidia’s reference drivers. I would assume this’d be one of the most tested setups, and that it’d be one of the better combos to use with bleem. Unfortunately, I couldn’t run squat. Games would either not run at all, crash a little ways in, have horrid visual anomalies, or just plain be too slow to play.

Things improved little by little with every new release, and the current version, 1.4a, is the first release that officially gets my stamp of approval. It still needs a lot of work, but it actually runs what I see as the 3 most popular psx games flawlessly in hardware, and that’s a watermark.

The first game I have to comment on is Crash Bandicoot 3. The bleem team has finally reached their goal in that Crash 3 runs great in hardware, both in horsepower usage (cpu, 3d accellerator), and memory usage. At 512x384 in 32bpp, I get 15-20fps, which is easily playable, and damn does it look good (see first pic).

The next game that runs great is Gran Turismo (second pic). Lots of ppl want this game to run on bleem, and they’ll be happy to know that it runs magnificently, roughly the same speed as Crash 3 (same setup).

The third game that runs great now is Tekken3. I sold my copy, but I’ve had a number of reliable sources tell me it’s awesome in D3D using 1.4a.

On the personal side, the one game I wanted to see in hardware was Xenogears. Unfortunately, the game’s engine doesn’t seem to render at all in D3D yet. :-/ I also tried Street Fighter Alpha3 (third pic). There’s no point to running it in D3D since it’s all sprites anyway (the sprite filtering hardly improves quality at all), but I figured it’d be an interesting test for bleem. “Interesting” was about the only word for it, it ran at about 1 or 2 fps.

I know I’m going to get asked the question, “Should I buy it?”, so I might as well answer it now. If you’re an emu enthusiast (like me), it’s fun to just tinker around with. Also, if you’ve got a fast PC and a good 3d accelerator, running Gran Turismo at 1024x768x32 might be really fun. Otherwise, wait it out- bleem will hopefully be a very capable emulator on a variety of hardware platforms soon. Hopefully this article shows that bleem is well on its way to achieving that goal. And as soon as that happens, you’ll read it here!