OUT OF ALL THE CONSOLES we could have covered, we chose the
PlayStation because of its influence on emulator history. Initially,
emulators for the PlayStation were buggy, unprofessional, and
just too niche to worry Sony. However, two polished commercial
titles would completely rock the boat and reshape history: bleem!
and Connectix Virtual Game Station.
In the mid-to-late ’90s, the Macintosh was starved of games,
and emulators were becoming more popular. Connectix was a
small company with a talent for virtualization, which was workingModern console emulation had a drawn-out
and painful birth, but it was all worth the effort
SEGA SATURN (1994)
Unlike the PlayStation, the Saturn is a deeply complex
machine, with a dual-CPU setup, and eight processors
overall. Initial sales were good in Japan, but Sega ruined
its launch in the West, and never really recovered from it.
Unfortunately, the Saturn was not well documented and
is considered tricky to program, so most games never
harnessed the performance the system could have given.
Despite this, Saturn games are aging nicely, and fetch
top-dollar on the second-hand market. The Saturn was a
beautiful machine crippled by company mismanagement,
but that makes the Saturn history’s interesting underdog,
with many gaming gems westerners have never heard of.
Unfortunately, all those processors make the Saturn
very difficult to emulate, and years later, things are still
quite patchy. The favorite emulator is still Mednafen, but it’s
very system-intensive, and can be difficult to get working.
Yabause has seen a lot of development lately, and is
catching up with Mednafen—it’s also much lighter and
faster. It was in our repository with both GTK and Qt GUI
front ends, and didn’t require any further steps, such as a
BIOS. If neither solution works for you, the Yabause core
can be used under RetroArch: https://yabause.org.on a PlayStation emulator
for the Mac—Virtual Game
Station (VGS). Having the
PlayStation library would
immediately expand Mac
users’ gaming options,
and VGS could run
PlayStation games
at full speed on a
relatively modest
iMac G3.
Connectix tried to
do the right thing by running
it past Sony, hoping to license
the BIOS and get some kind of
endorsement. It put on a demonstration
for Sony America’s CEO, but this only angered Sony, which sent
a cease and desist letter, and would not permit Connectix to
use the PlayStation’s BIOS code. Having already come this far,
Connectix started reverse-engineering Sony’s BIOS to make its
own compatible replacement, without any Sony source code.
Connectix set up a stand at that year’s MacWorld Expo and,
excited by the new gaming prospects for the Mac, Steve Jobs
spoke enthusiastically about the product in his keynote speech.
Sony happened to be at the Mac conference as well, and after a
visit to the company’s booth, it served a lawsuit on Connectix.
Connectix initially lost this battle, but appealed against the
decision. Amazingly, on 10 February 2000, a court ruling deemed
that its reverse-engineering was necessary to gain access to
unprotected functional elements within the system.
Given that Connectix hadn’t used any of Sony’s code in its
BIOS, it was deemed that its work constituted fair use. Sony
would go on to buy out Connectix and kill the product, but the
Sony versus Connectix court ruling opened the floodgates. This
was a landmark ruling for emulation as a whole, legitimizing both
emulation and reverse-engineering.
Connectix may have opened the market, but it was bleem! that
really brought emulation into the mainstream. Released in 1999,
bleem! was considered one of the best emulators of all time.
Not only did it have surprisingly modest system requirements,
it even had 3D acceleration, which could enhance the visuals of
PlayStation titles.
Its developers were confident that they wouldn’t face legal
action from Sony. After all, bleem! was created legally, being
entirely reverse-engineered, plus it ran games from the original
retail CDs, and therefore didn’t promote piracy. However, the
product’s CD cover may not have gone down well with Sony at all,
boasting “Higher Resolution—More Detail—Richer Color!” Sony
gave it both barrels, with a series of lawsuits. No one expected
the devs of bleem! to fight back, but they did—and to everyone’s
surprise, they won. Repeatedly. Bleem! became hugely popular,
and by the end of the decade, pretty much everyone had a copy—Loved by some—but not enough.HOW THE PLAYSTATION
CHANGED EMULATORS
so retro
32 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com