Bleemcast! disks, more games?

[Xian042]

Originally the Bleemcast! project was supposed to allow you to run most PS1 games on the Dreamcast. This got widdled down to disks that would only allow certain games to play on the DC, namely Gran Tourismo, Metal Gear Solid, and Tekken 3.
Has anyone found out if some of these dedicated Bleemcast! disks allow other PS1 games to play on the DC?

[PapaStu]

Nope. They had to 'neuter' their hope of an uber Bleem disc(s) down to just those major titles (in an attempt to sell as many as possible) before they were sued out of existance by Sony (Bleem won, they spent all their money on protecting themselves and died due to that).

They were also under the gun because if Sega had done an OS upgrade the work they had done to make whatever games work at the time would have had to been reworked to function on the newer versions of the DC OS.

[Borman]

Theres a beta disk of sorts out on the net that lets you load up more stuff. Its not that great for most things, but it functions :P

[Kitsune Sniper]

There's also game-specific hacks or something available... or so I've heard, I never looked into that.

[CosmicMonkey]

I've seen selfbooting PSone games for the Dreamcast before on torrent sites. They're just the Bleemcast! beta and a PSone game all in one nice selfbooting Discjuggler image. I'm not sure if anything has been done to the games or the emulator to make things run better, or if it is just the vanilla versions.

I'm actually tempted to see how Einhander and Harmful Park run on the DC.

[Captain Wrong]

IMHO, it's neat to see it done, but it's not exactly worth going out of your way for.

[An Hero]

IMHO, it's neat to see it done, but it's not exactly worth going out of your way for.

Twiddle Your Ballsack, Indiana? I drive by there sometimes! I moved to Indy from West Undershorts, Indiana.LOL

[Xian042]

IMHO, it's neat to see it done, but it's not exactly worth going out of your way for.

actually I thought gran turismo looked quite impressive, and MGS was very nice looking as well. I never tried the Tekken one.

[ProgrammingAce]

The thing that always gets me about bleemcast is that they were unofficially sanctioned by Sega. They were given semi-official access to the SystemDisc2 and system specs. At E3 2000, Bleamcast was seen to have self booting CD-R running in unmodded dreamcasts. Sega had given them the details of the Mil exploit in hopes bleem would help combat the PS2's backwards compatibility.

Several weeks after bleem showed the selfbooting CD-R, the mil exploit was "discovered" by a hacking group. In reality, some of the bleem members were angry that Sega had turned their backs on them due to the lawsuit and they gave away the mil exploit code.

You could say that Sega's ineptitude in handling Bleem is what killed the DC. First they gave them unofficial support, then they pulled the rug out from under them...

[Captain Wrong]

I'd never heard this story before. Very interesting.

[fishsandwich]

There's a list someone on this site of games that will work with the unreleased Bleemcast! disk.

Some of the games run great, other not at all, with a lot in between. You might have the graphics but no sound, or all the video is messed up, or the games runs a 5fps. I booted up Tobal 2 for the Japanese PS1 and it looks great but ran so slowlt as to be unplayable.

EDIT. Found the list

http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10553&highlight=bleemcast+compatibility

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Several weeks after bleem showed the selfbooting CD-R, the mil exploit was "discovered" by a hacking group. In reality, some of the bleem members were angry that Sega had turned their backs on them due to the lawsuit and they gave away the mil exploit code.
Is this just speculation or did someone personally involved tell you?

bleemcast wasn't the only thing shown at E3 2000 that was using the Mil-CD exploit. The Action Replay/Gameshark also used it. And, in fact, a demo of the Action Replay CDX which used the Mil-CD exploit came bundled with the June 2000 issue of DC-UK magazine. That Action Replay demo CD was ripped and available for download on the Internet by early June (I downloaded it myself to use as an region-defeating swap disc) and by the end of June the Utopia boot disc was available together with the first released Dreamcast ISOs.

A connection between those things is also speculation on my part as well, but it seems more likely to me than bleem as the source. Unless you have first person corroboration, of course.

The possibility of booting code from a Mil-CD was known even earlier, though. It had been a topic of discussion among early homebrewers on the Dreamcast and Marcus Comstedt had already begun researching Mil-CDs well before we saw them booting code at E3, so whether bleem or Datel were the ones that first spilled the info, it would have happened sometime in 2000 even without them.

Piracy didn't "kill the Dreamcast" anyway. Axing the Dreamcast was a decision made in Japan by Sega of Japan and CSK based on the Japanese market. The Dreamcast was selling so poorly in Japan that piracy wasn't an issue at all.


...word is bondage...

[diskoboy]

I was fortunate enough to be working at a Babbages store, when Bleemcast! came out. Everyone who worked there, at the time, bought the Gran Turismo disc, because we all knew that Bleem didn't stand a chance up against Sony's lawyers, and it would be a future rarity. Problem is, I still don't own a PSX copy of Gran Turismo. So I've never used my copy.

We got 3 copies of Bleemcast! MGS, only because of the 3 people who were wise enough to pre-order them.

Never saw Tekken....

[exit]

I downloaded one of those bleemcast! games floating around on torrents. While the game (Cowboy Bebop) was technically playable, the missing textures and such made me turn it off within a few minutes. In bleemcast's defense, I played the game normally via emulation and I also turned it off within minutes due to it sucking, so it was really just out of curiosity.

[ProgrammingAce]

Is this just speculation or did someone personally involved tell you?

There are a couple of sources. I started learning the story when talking to some of the early DC hackers. Eventually I heard the rumor that Sega had given the Mil-CD into to bleem in order to combat the PS2. I was able to find out from sources inside Sega's licensing department that System Disc 2 and other dev equipment was issued to Bleem's "Vice President". Bleem's name was nowhere to be found, but the equipment was issued as a 1st party developer rather then a 3rd party. That means someone inside Sega had to authorize and pay for the dev kits. Remember that Bleemcast was announced in January of 2000, so that means they had to be getting support well before Action Replay or any of the hacker groups knew of the Mil-CD issue.

If you go back to the map for E3 2000, the space Bleem occupied was listed as "Sega", which means Sega foot the bill for the space.

There's not a whole lot of proof i can link to. I wasn't able to put the whole thing together until i finally met one of the members of the first DC hacker group, Kalisto. It's a wild story, I really don't expect someone to believe it when i can't offer proof.

[CosmicMonkey]

Does anyone happen to have any pics of the prototype hardware? There was a Bleem branded controller adaptor with memory card slot and apparently a Bleempad too.

[acem77]

i have all of the retail bleem discs for the dc and they all work great.
i also dloaded most of the hacked discs and most of those work good also.
the funny thing is they will boot in a modded ps2 still.

[rbudrick]

i have all of the retail bleem discs for the dc and they all work great.
i also dloaded most of the hacked discs and most of those work good also.
the funny thing is they will boot in a modded ps2 still.

Wait, a DC Bleemcast disc will boot in a PS2? I'm confused...

-Rob

[roushimsx]

Wait, a DC Bleemcast disc will boot in a PS2? I'm confused...

A bootleg bleemcast disc in modded PS2. The structure of the PS1 game itself doesn't really change, so aside from the copy protection, I don't see why it wouldn't boot. Just shooting from the hip, but I guess when people merged the Bleemcast files with the PS1 data files, nothing was being overwritten or changed, right? So hey, double format discs ftw.

I guess you could get froggy and find a merged disc and boot it up in a PS1 emulator just for shits n grins, too.

[Xian042]

Back when it came out, I used the Bleemcast! disk for Metal Gear Solid and used a DC playstation controller adapter, unfortunately this made the gameplay very glitchy.

[suppafly]

I have great memories from my tekken 3 bleemcast. THe game looked a lot better although I noticed a little slowdown (Like it was running at 95% of the real speed on PSX at all times)

Did anyone else notice this?

[kedawa]

They were also under the gun because if Sega had done an OS upgrade the work they had done to make whatever games work at the time would have had to been reworked to function on the newer versions of the DC OS.
This is just nonsense. The DC doesn't have any sort of upgradeable firmware or built-in operating system.
If it did, Sega would have patched the mils CD exploit.

[ProgrammingAce]

The fact that the Dreamcast wasn't patchable is the reason the xbox was...

[Flack]

This is just nonsense. The DC doesn't have any sort of upgradeable firmware or built-in operating system.
If it did, Sega would have patched the mils CD exploit.

I think what he meant was, if a later version was released on new Dreamcasts in the stores. There weren't enough Dreamcasts online to upgrade them like consoles are done today.

I have several revs of the PC version of Bleem. Such a neat idea at the time.

[Buyatari]

Does anyone happen to have any pics of the prototype hardware? There was a Bleem branded controller adaptor with memory card slot and apparently a Bleempad too.

I recently sold all my prototype Dreamcast stuff that included 2 of the Bleem adapters. Here they are.

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t245/WastingOrpheus/new/MVC-021S.jpg

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t245/WastingOrpheus/new/MVC-022S.jpg

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t245/WastingOrpheus/new/MVC-023S.jpg

Also had a 1st party memory card as well (which had nothing to do with Bleem but here it is anyway)

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t245/WastingOrpheus/MVC-037S-2.jpg

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t245/WastingOrpheus/MVC-038S-1.jpg

[Jorpho]

Hey, this thread is already the first Google hit for <mil exploit> !

Are there details on how it works somewhere? I'm curious.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Mil-CDs are pretty simple from what I understand. They're comprised of two sessions; first there's an audio session which is usually just 4 seconds of silence for homebrew, but might be ingame music in a pirated game, and then all the game data including the main binary is in the second session. They're also sometimes referred to as audio/data discs since they have an audio session follow by a data session (later another method of creating bootable dreamcast discs was found called the data/data method which I don't know much about aside from what the name implies). The first 32K of the data session contains the bootstrap code from a file called IP.BIN which gets everything up and running and then you're good to go.

Try adding some of those other terms to your search if you're still looking for more info. I know that one of the Dreamcast release groups (I think it was Echelon) put out a pretty detailed tutorial on how to create selfbooting mil-CD format discs out of their non-selfbooting pirate releases.


...word is bondage...

[Jorpho]

Oh, so it's a legitimate CD format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil-CD) that the console supported. Makes perfect sense.

[Kyle15]

How do you save game when you use a Bleemcast disc?
I read somewhere that a deticated VMU is required.

[Chuplayer]

How do you save game when you use a Bleemcast disc?
I read somewhere that a deticated VMU is required.

Yes, you do need a VMU that is formatted just for PS1 games. I forget if it's the Bleem disc or the game that sees that you've got an unformatted card, but something takes care of it for you.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

The leaked bleemcast beta doesn't support saving, only the regular released discs for Gran Turismo, Metal Gear and Tekken 3 will save. You have to format a VMU for them, but you can put them all on one card at least.

It's done in game, when you go to save they'll recognize the memory card as unformatted and ask you if you want to format it (they'll use the card in slot A1). It'd be really nice if there was a memory card manager built into the bleemcast frontend so that you could format cards and move saves around at will. They also should have had a controller config screen so that you could set up things however you wanted. Controller config would have been especially nice so that you could map acceleration and braking to the shoulder triggers.


...word is bondage...

[Kyle15]

Yes, you do need a VMU that is formatted just for PS1 games. I forget if it's the Bleem disc or the game that sees that you've got an unformatted card, but something takes care of it for you.

Thanks for letting me know! :)


The leaked bleemcast beta doesn't support saving, only the regular released discs for Gran Turismo, Metal Gear and Tekken 3 will save. You have to format a VMU for them, but you can put them all on one card at least.

It's done in game, when you go to save they'll recognize the memory card as unformatted and ask you if you want to format it (they'll use the card in slot A1). It'd be really nice if there was a memory card manager built into the bleemcast frontend so that you could format cards and move saves around at will. They also should have had a controller config screen so that you could set up things however you wanted. Controller config would have been especially nice so that you could map acceleration and braking to the shoulder triggers.


...word is bondage...

Those sound like some good ideas. :)
The Bleemcast does not sound so user friendly by what I've heard, and all of that cool sounding stuff would probably do it good.