Post a Comment On: The Dreamcast Junkyard

I have a confession to make.

I, the GagaMan(n), anti-Playstation extraordinarie, have bought myself a PSone.

Before you all come charging down to my house with pitch folks and axes, I have my reasons. First, it wasn't the butt ugly early model, but the cute as puppies smaller model that looks a little bit like the Dreamcast. Second, it was in next to brand new condition. Third, it came in a cool little official carry case, and forth, and most importantly, it only cost me five quid.

Now I would give any console a go for that kind of price, so here I am, plugging up a console I swore I would never own, but hey, I already have games for it, remember? The one's I bought dirt cheap to try on the Bleemcast beta emulator? Yeah, those. Now I can actually save my progress for them! Sadly, I can't run the burned discs of rare Japanese games I've got, as I'd need to get a mod chip in it to run them, but at least I can compare how the games look on the console they were made for and the console they weren't. I had gotten used to the smoothness of Time Crisis running on Bleem, so sticking the game into the PSone gave me a bit of a shock as everything is much, much more pixellated. It's all to do with the fact that in Bleem the games run at twice the resolution they do on the PSone and even the PS2 (and, by the sounds of recent news, the PS3 as well). Haha!

Now don't get me wrong, the Playstation had some true classics and under rated gems on it, but you try finding proper copies of them. Browsing through Gamestation and GAME in various towns, it seems that everyone has held onto these gems and given these shops nothing but football games. I swear to god, the PSone has about a million of them, even one just focused around David Beckham! Compare this to the six or seven that the Dreamcast has. Not being a fan of Football myself, I'm kind of glad I don't have to bury my way through every month's FIFA release when searching for good Dreamcast games, but it could have had at least one really good one, like Worldwide Soccer 98 on the Saturn. If it's not football, it's some other sports sim, wrestling, or one of the early racing games like Porsche Challenge and RIIIIDGE RACER. Sigh.

I was lucky to find one gem last week, however, at a boot sale for £1. R-Type Delta, a rather lovely 2.5D (Read: 2D game with 3D graphics) shump. Although I am a big shump fan, I never really got into the R-Type series, so this is a first go at it. For the fun of it I ran it through the Bleem Beta and, what do you know, it worked almost perfectly in it! With it being an arcade game and all, you don't really need to save this game unless you want to keep your rankings, so it's the prefect kind of game to run well in Bleem. Here's the clip I ripped from it, in which I do pretty terribly.



Thanks to that Portable Video thingy I won last week, it's now easier for me to rip this stuff. before I had to record it to video, then record that video through a DVD recorder, then rip that DVD footage onto the PC, which took bloody ages. Now, I can just plug this little device into my telly, rip the footage, and drag it onto my computer! Hurrah!

Another game I burned for the PSX recently with Bleem self boot built in was, funnily enough, another 2.5D shooter from a series I never got into when it started out: G-Darius. This game has the odd music issues, like most games in this emulator, but looks perfectly fine. Playing it on super easy mode so I don't look like a plonker blowing up a lot, which commenter's on YouTube would soon point out, as they always do. Here the clip:



Finally, there's been some interesting news recently at dcemu.co.uk abouts developments with another Playstation Emulator, known as PSX4ALL, which is in it's beta stages and is looking great so far. The post at the forum shows some screen shots and videos of it's current progress. It's slower than Bleemcast at the moment, but it does have the potential to surpass it. For starters, it looks like it may be able to run those dreaded video files Bleem hates so much, and it may, after some tinkering about, be able to save memory card files to the VMU too, in he future. Keep your eyes on this!