Bleem

Bleem! was one of the first commercial PSX emulators. Unlike most emulators, you had to buy it, which was unusual at the time and did not sit well with companies like Sony.

Bleem! emulated a range of games to varying degrees and was surprisingly fast. This was because it was written mostly in assembly language, which allowed very precise optimisations but made the code much more complicated.

It also used the PC’s graphics hardware to speed up 3D rendering. Bleem! won its court cases against Sony, but it could not afford the legal fees, and the company shut down.

Those cases, together with Sony’s lawsuit against Connectix over its Virtual Game Station, helped establish that emulators themselves are legal, paving the way for the many free PSX emulators that followed.

Note: Bleem! may not run on any version of Windows newer than Windows 98.