Bleem, released in 1999 is a Sony Playstation emulator developed by David Herpolsheimer and Randy Linden. It could run on hardware as low as a Pentium 166mhz cpu with 16mb of ram. Although it did make use of 3D accelerators and more ram, which allowed for graphical enhancements similar to today’s emulators such as DuckStation.

These were the early days of emulation and as you can imagine there were quite a few legal issues. According to the information I could gather, Sony filed a lawsuit  two days after Bleem had begun taking preorders. 

The complaint in the lawsuit targeted the redistribution of Sony’s Playstation bios as a copyright violation. Initially a judge had rejected the notion, which is surprising given how these lawsuits tend to go these days. The district court followed up in Sony’s favor and issued a preliminary injunction, which Bleem successfully appealed. 

Sony would eventually file another lawsuit, this time targeting, “Bleemcast”. Bleemcast wasn’t a dreamcast emulator as the name suggests. It was a version of Bleem that could run Sony Playstation games on the Sega Dreamcast. While no court ruled against Bleem, they didn’t have the deep pockets that Sony does.Bleem could not keep up with the legal defense spending. Sony basically, out-sued them. The high court costs would lead to the closure of Bleem in 2001.

That’s the short version of Bleem! History. Earlier this year, Randy Linden did an interview with Zophar on YouTube. It’s a great interview that you should check out.

Now, let’s use Bleem!