lord kodak

any body had any experances with this software on the dream cast?

WepaMan

I have the Gran Turismo Bleemcast CD. It works great. The only down side I can see is the fact that it requires an entire memory card to save games.

lord kodak

WepaMan - can i ask where u got it from and what u do with it.

WepaMan

I got it from Electronics Boutique. It's a CD that you place in your dreamcast to boot up. It will then ask you to swap it with the original Gran Turismo 2 CD for the Playstation. You're basically playing Gran Turismo 2 on your Dreamcast with higher resolution and improved graphics.

Fanboy

They are apparently releasing another Bleemcast! disc in the near future (early fall), this time for Metal Gear Solid.

I saw pics of it in the latest EGM, looks really sweet.

AOD

I think it's great that they are releasing single disc bleem games, but where's the discs for tons of the game that was suppose to be out, oh, a year or so ago. It seems doubtful that we'll ever see that.

Fanboy

No, I think that ship had sailed. And sunk. Looks like it will just be single disc bleems.

Chris_D

I believe the first few discs will be Gran Turismo 2 (already out), Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 9 (of which I've seen some really nice looking screen shots), and Tekken 3. Personally I'd like to see Final Fantasy 7 (didn't like 9) and Grandia (runs so slooooow on the psx!) packs. I'm sure there'd be a large fan demand for a Xenogears pack also.

Chris

Liquid Death

I think I'll get MGS and FF9 (I have it, but I haven't started it yet)...and isn't Xenogears EXTREMELY hard to find? I can't see Bleem supporting that one...

Chris_D

Xenogears is being re-released soon I thought.

Presumably there must be a fair number of copies existing in circulation for it to achieve the popularity it has. Also due to it's hard core fanbase, it's likely that a xg bleemcast pack would sell quite well I think.

Chris

common

I just ordered this new off of eb.com(so it is still available somewhat). I had wanted this game for the longest time and I didn't want the supply to run out and have to pay half.com or ebay prices for a used copy. Please don't tell me that this will have greatest hits pricing like FFT(which is tempting enough to make me want to purchase a backup copy in case my FFT goes bad). Especially since I can't play it right now as my PSX is in storage for the next month+ while my new house is being built.

Liquid Death

My mistake - I didn't know it had been re-released - earlier this year, I remember copies were pretty expensive on eBay.

DavePack

With the Dreamcast's limited future, I would think bleem would need to be focusing on other hardware platforms as well. Obviously, PS2 is out because of the backward compatibility. Is there any news on development of an Xbox bleem? If I remember correctly, GC uses a smaller, proprietary CD, correct? Or are the GC games themselves on smaller discs, but the GC will still accept full-size CD's? If the latter is true, I suppose bleem could develop for GC as well.

Of course, this assumes people still want to play PSX games on those platforms, and I'm thinking either most people still have their PSX, or there just won't be an interest there. I'd be interested in knowing just how bleem is looking toward the future.

Chris_D

The gamecube will only take the minidiscs so that's out of the question. I would have thought that an xbox port would be very easy to do.

I think PSX emulation will be popular for some time to come. The psx has such a large library and certain game genres such as rpgs will take time to be significantly improved on (FFX doesn't impress me at all). Of course some people still argue that the best rpgs are on the snes.

Chris

Grimm1

I'd love to see something from Bleem that could be loaded onto the Xbox HD to make it DC compatible.

Chris_D

It will never happen. The DC is far too powerful to be emulated by the XBox. Buy yourself a DC instead.

Chris

Grimm1

I've got one and the Xbox certainly is powerfull enough to emulate the DC. I mean all you have to do is look at the quality of all the stuff Sega is porting over to the Xbox to see that this is true.

Chris_D

Emulating is entirely different from porting. With a port the actual game software is rewritten to run on the target platform. With emulation a piece of software is written that examines each non native instruction in the game and translates it to a number of native instructions that do the same thing. Hopefully that makes sense.

A conservative estimate for emulating a piece of hardware is that you need a platform at least 10X as powerful as the platform you are emulating. Some real examples are:
SNES (snes9x, zsnes) -> requires Pentium 166 for full performance.
Genesis (genecyst, kgen) -> requires Pentium 120 for full performance.
PSX (Bleem PC) -> requires PII400 (atleast) for full performance.

Bleem DC gets such good performance due to the fact it doesn't have to run on top of windows and each pack is customised for a certain game. Even then, the DC is arguably atleast 10x as powerful as the PSX if you factor in video hardware, ram etc.. (on cpu clock speed alone its about 6 x as fast).

So as you can see, the idea of emulating DC games at full speed on an XBOX is utterly insane. Which makes all the requests from people wanting DC emulation on the PS2 even more laughable

Chris