HOW THE PLAYSTATION CHANGED EMULATORS

Modern console emulation had a drawn-out and painful birth, but it was all worth the effort.

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 re-shape history:

Connectix Virtual Game Station and bleem!.

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

virtualisation, which was working 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 their 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 them to use the Playstation’s BIOS code. Having already come this far, Connectix started reverseengineering 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 to 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 vs Connectix court ruling opened the floodgates. This was a landmark ruling for emulation as a whole, legitimising 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 at the end of the decade pretty much everyone had a copy – it was fun showing console peasants Metal

Gear Solid in high resolution (and RICHER COLOR–ED).

Ultimately bleem! sales dried up, and Sony’s constant litigation wore down both Connectix and bleem!, but these companies set a legal precedent and made emulation mainstream. Nowadays major game companies emulate their older games on newer systems, even Sony itself (to a degree).

PLAYSTATION EMULATION TODAY

Overall, the Playstation hardware was relatively simple compared to its rivals, and there have been numerous emulators over the years. No one in gaming documentaries talks about it being a mysterious puzzle to crack, but there is one challenge that continues to plague Playstation emulators today – and surprisingly, it’s that BIOS. While there are open source replacements out there, compatibility still isn’t brilliant and most guides suggest just using the proprietary Sony BIOS, despite the legal issues.

Starting with the purest open source Linux option, your best bet for now is PCSX. This should be in your repository, and comes with its own BIOS replacement. However, if you get a real BIOS (we’re not going to tell you where from!), copy the files to ~/.pcsx/bios/ and in the configuration you’ll need to select the file you’ve copied. If games crash immediately, open the Configuration menu and under ‘Plugins and BIOS’, try changing the driver from Opengl to XV.

We had mixed results with PCSX, and it didn’t work on all our machines. Though it pains us to say it, the closed-source EPSXE worked much better. Although it can make use of a BIOS replacement, the official BIOS is still recommended, and save states apparently won’t work if you switch between BIOSES (though this may have changed in recent years). Its website at www. epsxe.com provides a tarball with a binary precompiled and almost ready to go, but you will need to make it executable. Right-click the file, choose Properties, and somewhere in your file manager should be the option to change file permissions, where you can flag it as executable. You should be able to just click the file and have it run now, though you will want to set up basics such as controls and video modes. The defaults aren’t great, and EPSXE probably won’t automatically setup your gamepad (at least, it didn’t for us). Retroarch and Mednafen are two other alternatives, though both require a BIOS and a certain amount of configuration. Retroarch needs quite a few steps to get Playstation games working, but there are plenty of guides online to get you going.

Mednafen kept giving us some very strange errors, and eventually we headed back to EPSXE in frustration.

For those willing to work past the initial barriers, the Playstation library will be worth it. Sony was an upstart in the console market but trounced all its competitors, the Playstation becoming the biggest console of the ’90s. From Metal Gear Solid to Gran Turismo to the

Final Fantasy games, the number of classics is just far too long to list.

Playstation magazines also had coverdiscs every month filled with demos – something that used to be almost the sole domain of PC users. This fostered an underground coding scene in ways that companies like Nintendo never could, and as a result, the Playstation library is colossal.

The work of Connectix and bleem! may have been lost over time, but their precedent is not. Open source BIOS replacements are becoming increasingly popular, and emulators like DESMUME for the Nintendo DS and

Citra for the 3DS just run immediately.

Before we go, there is one final twist to this saga. The recent Playstation Classic console, officially licensed by Sony, itself uses an emulator to play old ROMS: REARMED, an ARM port of PCSX. Which is opensource. But we don’t want to advertise that too loudly, because reviews haven’t been great… most of us can set up a better default configuration than Sony!