While its nice to romanticize the life of a techno upstart – there’s something noble about the computer wiz down in the basement throwing a wrench into the corporate machine, or the beer league Hooligans in their oversized station wagon mock-up showing up the big league Giants in their patented Vista Cruiser – this legally sanctioned reverse engineering does come at some cost.

The last thing we gamers need is the ability to play EA’s abysmal PSX game Rushdown on the PC. Likewise mediocre titles like Acclaim’s PSX version of WWF Attitude or anything from FOX Sports. The game market is utterly saturated with games that already look like crap, play like crap’ ergo, they are crap- do we really need all this crap smeared across other platforms? Emulators do not let sleeping dogs lie, they bring ‘em to the ballpark where they crap capriciously. That truly sucks.

Worse than that, neither CVGS nor bleem! really give PlayStation titles a fair shake.

Both emulators come with adamant disclaimers not only about the lack of endorsement, but they plainly elucidate that users aren’t necessarily going to get a very good rendition of the Vista they are about to cruise.

Both emulators require tremendous amounts of PC horsepower, with bleem! recommending, among other high-end hardware and cards, a Pentium II running at 300Mhz; CVGS suggests 400Mhz as optimal.

Furthermore, while CVGS is the user-friendlier of the two (no CD swapping, launches at start, etc.), both come with innumerable incompatibility problems (which is why the console market is so strong: one dedicated gaming platform, one level playing field for all developers). Both emulators have a tough time operating in an over-clocked system; they don’t like Creative Lab’s Disc Detector auto-function; they don’t like certain video cards and sound cards (even those that come “stock” in Gateway 2000 and some Compaq computers); they don’t like a good deal of disparate operating software such as that used with CD burners- in fact, part of bleem!’s FAQ page reads thus: “the Adaptec CD-R burning software ends up mangling some pretty important Windows system files…”

Needless to say, emulator users are expected to be fairly PC savvy in order to run the copycat software. More than that, they’re expected to have a fairly high-end machine, though older, slower-on-the-uptake PCs will still manage the task, but to much less effect.

Which brings us to the fact that neither bleem! nor CVGS can emulate ALL PlayStation games, nor do they ever claim such a feat. The bleem! compatible games number about half the PSX North American library, some 600 titles, with an aspiration to eventual compatibility with the more than 3,000 PSX games available worldwide. Of these current titles, however, the majorities are reported to run at only partial effectiveness with notable glitches in sound or graphics or general consistency before it just gives up the ghost. Bleem! has not updated the compatibility library since November of last year, though a big update is expected shortly, probably after yet another court date with Sony scheduled later this month.

While Connectix Virtual Game Station for the Mac offers a fairly stable emulator – in fact, a highly acclaimed application (so I’ve read, I don’t own a Mac anymore… sigh) – the recently released PC version is less effective. On the upside, however, CVGS will play games it doesn’t even bother listing in library, knowing full well that it won’t give that unlisted game a good run.

For the record, I tried a dozen different games for both emulators (the entire Tomb Raider and Jet Moto series, FFVII and FFVIII) and found issues on each. Ultimately, it was GT Interactive’s Driver that played benchmark as both emulators handle the game adequately with bleem! futzing the sound and CVGS botching the frame rate from time to time.

Driver does, in fact, look pretty darn spanky emulated, with notable polish to the classic PlayStation pixelly look.

That said, however, one has to remember that the average gamer’s PC monitor is notably smaller than the average television monitor, so while it’s neat to see a PlayStation games natural resolution of 320x200 boosted, augmented, 3D enhanced, accelerated and directXed to 640x480 or 800x600 (higher even), the experience is nevertheless squashed onto a smaller screen, even a smaller window on screen, depending on your PC’s default resolution or if you care to modify the default. This is not console gaming anymore, it’s PC gaming of middling quality and contrary to the sit on the couch, sip a beverage and play appeal of console gaming.

Then there’s the ever present cloning conundrum showing its face with a slide show presentation where fast action should be, farting noises instead of gunfire, bizarre graphical pop and flutter that would make the PlayStation proud, or just a plain old fashioned system-wide crash. Bleem, ever diligent, has noticed it’s compatibility problems are often due, in part, to the zealotry of some users. “People still feel obliged
to click all the options because they're out there in the open,” reveals Herpolsheimer. “We've been working on the next version of bleem! which features a nifty new GUI, hides a lot of the options that are better left untouched, and greatly simplifies memcards, controller setup, and overall use with a pretty powerful profiler. It's going to be cool…”

But there’s still the fact that emulators currently don’t play all games and don’t play many games adequately.

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