Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

General purpose discussion about gaming and emulation.
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Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by cube_b3 »

Yesterday my brother purchased or downloaded (via PS+ free to play) Crash Bandicoot 3 on PS3).

It was sad... in spite of employing Rand Linden (according to wikipedia) Sony can not do a decent job with an emulator that enhances the game? Xbox emulation on X360 may not have been completed but the games that run on it are enhanced... why can't Sony do that?
Crash Bandicoot is a 3D game and it would have been so easy to just sharpen the graphics and improve the resolution... so sad.

So the CB trilogy and Syphon Filter are defiently on my PS1 replay list, I was wondering if there was an emulator better than bleem available?

P.S. Bleemcast does an amazing job of Crash Bandicoot emulation 100% Speed, 100% Music and 0% sound + Cut Scenes + Menu's/
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by DaMadFiddler »

Uh... PCSX and EPSXE have both been around for over a decade and are quite mature, with lots of available plugins and ports to many different platforms.

In terms of compatibility, a lot will depend on what graphics plugin you're using and how it's configured.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Specially Cork »

EPSXE is the one I always use.

There are a few enhancements in Sony's - you need to turn them on by pressing the Playstation button after booting the game.

Personally though, I hate all that. I find a nice charm in what they managed to do with early 3D. Metal Gear Solid just isn't the same without all those lovely pixels. At least everything was crisp.

N64 on the other hand...
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by DaMadFiddler »

Specially Cork wrote:Personally though, I hate all that. I find a nice charm in what they managed to do with early 3D. Metal Gear Solid just isn't the same without all those lovely pixels. At least everything was crisp.

N64 on the other hand...
Exactly the opposite. I found early 3D ugly, blocky, and unrefined-looking at the time, and that perception has only gotten worse as these games have aged. The PS1/Saturn/N64 era was my least favorite console generation overall, and the transition from (at that point) fairly refined and polished 2D to 3D that was often messy and crude by comparison was a big part of that. If any generation of software really needs the benefits of enhancement through emulation, it's that one.

The N64 is the only one of those systems that DOES still look half-decent, because it was the only one with filtered textures and antialiasing.

The PS3 does have a filter you can turn on for PS1 and PS2 games, but it's basically a bilinear filter on the final output, which will disguise the pixelation of 2D assets some but do very little for the 3D. It's a shame they never bothered to let the built-in emulator render geometry at a higher resolution, or filter the textures. Even the Wii's ridiculously barebones Virtual Console increases the native rendering of N64 games to 640x480 (which is what the Wii runs at).
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by cube_b3 »

@ Cork: Yeah, I tried those enhancement i.e wide screen, graphics smoothing. Both were useless and didn't really help. Stretching a game that is 4:3 to 16:9 makes the game look worse not better. Graphics smoothing was less than marginal.

I know what you mean about the PS1 charm. Tekken flaws are clearly exaggerated on Bleemcast but I still prefer the clean blocky look over a muddy one.

I will have to try these other emulators all I used was Bleem, Bleemcast and VGS. VGS had perfect emulation but the games actually looked worse than they did on playstation. I recommend everyone to try out Crash Bandicoot with Bleemcast it looks awesome (from what I remember).
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Skynet »

IIRC there was no Bleemcast for Crash. So you're promoting warez.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Matisfaction »

OMG WAREZ!!!!11
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Specially Cork »

Buy the original off eBay and support the developers and Sega!
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Juan »

I don't think anyone said pSX so here it goes:

http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by |darc| »

cube_b3 wrote:in spite of employing Rand Linden (according to wikipedia) Sony can not do a decent job with an emulator that enhances the game?
I have never heard this before and I seriously doubt that is the case. In which article did you read this?


Also, bleem! for PC is garbage compared to the PSX emulators that exist for Windows nowadays. It was amazing for what it was at the time but it has long since been surpassed.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Skynet »

|darc| wrote:
cube_b3 wrote:in spite of employing Rand Linden (according to wikipedia) Sony can not do a decent job with an emulator that enhances the game?
I have never heard this before and I seriously doubt that is the case. In which article did you read this?


Also, bleem! for PC is garbage compared to the PSX emulators that exist for Windows nowadays. It was amazing for what it was at the time but it has long since been surpassed.
The great thing about bleem! at the time is that it ran PS1 games on my shitty PC that I had where other emulators wouldn't. Obviously they're way better now, as you pointed out but it was awesome back in the day.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by cube_b3 »

@ Darc: If you are talking about Rand Linden working at Sony, that is from Bleem's article on Wikipedia. It was uncited information.
If you are talking about game comparison, that is my own hands on experience with playing PS1 games on Dreamcast.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by |darc| »

I just looked up the article and saw that it said "as of 2005." Doing a Google search for Rand working at SCEA, I could only find a few people mentioning this (as hearsay) on forums but no solid information.

Rand continued to post here occasionally until around 2006 (his last login was 2007, though). Although he never discussed exactly what happened to end bleem! (likely due to legal agreements with Sony), we can safely assume he was not offered or at least did not accept a job with Sony because he formed a new company (Bobbee Tec) to work on mobile games technologies around 2002 or so. Bobbee Tec's last demo that I saw was a version of their Cyboid 3D FPS engine running on a hacked iPod video (what we now know as the iPod classic). That was in 2007. Oddly enough, the iPhone was released not long after, and the mobile games industry exploded, but Bobbee Tec's presence online completely disappeared, and I have no idea what happened to Rand since then.

The PS3 debuted with software PSX emulation in late 2006, so the timeline of Rand working at BobbeeTec until 2007 does not work out. In addition, while Rand is no doubt an extremely talented programmer, I don't believe he had some world class programming talent that required such a collaboration, especially given their pasts.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Specially Cork »

I can't imagine Sony needed anybody's help in emulating their own hardware on their own incredibly superior new hardware.

Especially in such a limited fashion.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by cube_b3 »

Then why is the emulation inferior?

Especially since 360 offers enhanced emulation for X-Box.
PS3 came out almost a year after 360, they should've factored enhanced emulation....
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Skynet »

It's not like Sony were obligated to include it, they just did for a period of time. So what does it matter how good it was? The 360 emulation had a number of problems as it was. I've experienced issues with original Xbox games on the 360.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by DaMadFiddler »

Yeah, I wouldn't really call the 360's Xbox emulation "better" than the PS3's PlayStation emulator.

No, there really doesn't seem to be any reason (other than lack of effort/interest) that Sony couldn't have included more features in the PS3's PlayStation emulator. However, it has nearly perfect compatibility, whereas the 360's Xbox eulation upscales the game but will only run about half the Xbox's library.

If it comes down to it, I'll take higher accuracy & compatibility over emulation with more bells and whistles any day.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Specially Cork »

cube_b3 wrote:Then why is the emulation inferior?

Especially since 360 offers enhanced emulation for X-Box.
PS3 came out almost a year after 360, they should've factored enhanced emulation....
That's my point. It hardly looks like the work of Ran Linden does it? When Sega needed help with their emulator they hired Christian Whitehead and the difference was phenomenal. If Sony had brought Linden onboard I would've expected something better.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by DaMadFiddler »

That's... not really accurate. Christian Whitehead (aka "Taxman") was part of the Sonic fangames community (yeah, it's a thing) at what is now sonicretro.org, and built a highly accurate and flexible recreation of the Sonic 3 game engine. He was hired by Sega so that engine could be used to reconstruct a more feature-rich and tweakable version of Sonic CD so they wouldn't HAVE to do it as an emulation. That would also make it more portable and easier to work in additional features like proper widescreen support, changing spindash types, and adding Tails & Knuckles, to name a few. That engine was then used to redo the mobile release of Sonic 1, which had previously been a (somewhat shoddy) emulated version. Rumor is they're currently redoing the mobile version of Sonic 2 the same way.

But yeah, if Rand had been involved in Sony's PlayStation emulator, I definitely would have expected high-res rendering and graphics filters to be included.
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Re: Is there a better PS1 Emulator than Bleem

Post by Specially Cork »

Fair do's
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