investigating bleemcast

most people here know me by now, and know i'm not at the skill level as most of the people who find this board useful, but my ideas in my mind seem to lead to other cool stuff being found most of the time

for years i could never get a working burn for bleemcast metal gear solid and a few days ago i did, and i must say wow what an amazing achievement for that tech

the point of this thread is i completely refuse to believe that there's not general and non-game-specific debug menus and similar in bleemcast

i know that bleemcast is a thing of its own completely different from anything released on dreamcast, and only one single person or group of people was able to selfboot it and nobody else knows how to. but as far as i've seen in my time with the dc scene is all we know about bleemcast is nothing beyond the fact that it exists and works

essentially i have a hunch that its impossible that metal gear solid can run THIS PERFECTLY on dreamcast and there's no way it can run at least ONE more game. but if that's true, it would be certainly useful and interesting to know why

but i'm not looking for any particular result, i'm just saying "hey guys we should take a closer look at this" and at least be able to extract the damn retail versions to see what files are even on the bleemcast discs, until then nobody can even load it up in IDA for fun and that's a pretty interesting subject for me

 

I am just waiting for Japanese-Cake to fully update us on this post.

After that, we should both have fully selfbooting versions of the games, and they should work from the ODE solutions. As well as us looking into getting other selfbooting decent versions of the games working such as the ones we can see in here in this video like Red Alert, as well as that Worms game.



Those were all booted with the retail emu's, so no reason to not continue the work I started here and get us a constantly updated compatibility list. There HAS to be other games than the few we discovered at TIZ working with it.

Also, it was discovered that we can play Metal Gear Solid Integral with this patch here.

atreyu187 once had this to say about the other games not saving when used with the skipped disc check hacked retail releases.

"I do have an idea to make games save though that do work with certain disc. If you change the disc ID slus-xxxx to tekkens ID if that is the disc used as im sure it refers to that file that is in every psx game for the save feature to work."

Seriously worth a shot, as I think he may just be onto something here.

 

For me, remove the bios protections sounds like the best way to go. I'm very agree.

 

If we be able to run the retail ones from DreamShell/GDEMU/GDUSB Ill be very happy.

 

I've just tested it on my GDEMU, it freezes on the Legal screen! Very close to boot to the main menu.

 

Pretty sure this was already tried like a billion years ago, not entirely sure though.
Reality is that the bleem guys really really went very very far out of their way to make sure nothing could be copied or modified.

It's really going to take someone like jc to finish this one.

 

Perhaps he can figure something out. But if a few more games could be made to work out of this then mission accomplished. I would like to see another compatibility list started building upon the one I already created at TIZ in 2011. However, I only have the GDEMU in my working cast, and the other is a parts machine for if my current ever kicks the bucket or needs parts. Already sold the broken disc drives out of both to somebody here so really no way for me to continue testing game compatibility.

If JC gets around to making it easy to create selfbooting discs with these retails unlike how they are done with the betas that require you to burn a physical copy, rip it and then you have the burnable .iso then I would be willing to test it again.

I am interested in seeing C&C Red Alert like on that video above, as well as that Worms game.

 

So I know the story, I know the intent, and I know they went to some intense lengths for it, but I have to wonder why nobody is just trying to seek out the guy that made it for some answers.
Is that an option? Is it not? Surely this has been tried already right?

 

Randy is a nice guy but I doubt he'd help people crack what he protected in the first place. That, and he had tons of trouble with Sony over BC! and he might not be at liberty to help even if he wanted to, legally.

Fun fact: he's also the genius behind the SNES version of Doom.

 

Also, the guy was hired by Sony immediately after Bleem went under, so no, it isn't in his best interest to help us out with this one, or worth his time.

 

I recently watched some talks from John Romero and he repeatedly stated said SNES Doom port was being worked on by some guy, and then went MIA so they had to do it themselves. Is Randy on the Doom team in this case (at the time)?
And yes I'm sure he might have issues with sharing now that you refreshed my memory about the cases to begin with, but seeing as he never lost the suits but instead had to stop due to money (from my understanding) surely it's not as big of an issue as it might be at face value?

Does he still work for Sony? If so, that ain't happening. If not, maybe he would.

Whatever the case I have to commend him on his effort of protecting this stuff so effectively. It really puts to shame current DRM solutions

 

Not according to his LinkedIn profile.
He was at Microsoft for almost a decade though.

 

I think you misunderstood Romero, it is well known fact that Randy Developed Doom for SNES. He coded the engine almost alone, hacking a Starfox cart to build his own SuperFX Amiga-based devkit before official ones were available. I don't think he ever worked for Sony.

 

"Interestingly, both Herpolsheimer and Linden ended up being hired by Sony in the months that followed."

http://www.seganerds.com/2015/05/19/whatever-happened-bleemcast/

I knew I heard this was the case.

I don't know what he is doing now, only what happened immediately after but yeah, it is such a long shot I just don't think we will see any pointers from him. This was singlehandledly one of his highest and lowest points achievement-wise, so I am sure the topic is bittersweet for him at this point.

 

Funny that it's not in his CV. Maybe he's bitter about it or he didn't stay there for any length of time worth mentioning. Or the source is wrong.

 

Yeah here is a little more info on it, a GREAT article too I had no idea existed until now, a goldmine of information about the inner workings of the company.

"After bleem! folded, Linden, in a career move that initially hurt Herpolsheimer, went to work for Sony Computer Entertainment, having been advised to entertain an offer of work from them as part of the settlement. He was initially paid a fee as a consultant in order to help explain bleem!'s technology. In a twist of fate, Kauppinen would make a similar move, going on to work for the now-defunct Sony Online Entertainment from 2002-2005 as a PR lead on popular titles such as PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-12-11-the-history-of-bleem

So the rumors I heard seem to be true, Sony partially hired him and paid him off pretty much. Basically forcing them to close that chapter of their lives and put it behind them.

So it is little to no wonder why the guy never wanted to help out with releasing any source or anything else.

 

Even if he wanted to, the settlement probably prohibits him from doing so.

About copy protection, Randy also had prior experience on that front, having coded very good copy protection for his Amiga port of Dragon's Lair.

 

Ah my mistake, I was thinking about the Wolfenstein 3D incident not Doom. Sorry for the confusion
Edit: video in question (one of)

 

Yeah no doubt it was a stipulation of the settlement.

Still though, the fact @japanese_cake has been able to fully remove the protections from MGS at least, is pretty mind blowing. I think I once heard there was like 40 places in the code where if it didn't get the right information it wouldn't load, so some pretty fantastic protections. JC is pretty smart too to even be able to just remove them like that in the first place. I would love to hear more from him about it. Eagerly awaiting any updates from him on twitter...

 

Do you think it's possible to contact him anyway, a refusal cost us nothing.