Hi Aaarghgh,
The answer is yes, and no. There is (or was) commercial Playstation
Emulation software available, however Sony sued the makers of the
software - the full commericial versions of the most advanced ones,
Virtual Game Station and Bleem!, are no longer available, however the
demo versions are still floating around the net.
In the case of Bleem!, they managed to defend themselves from Sony's
lawsuits but eventually died anyway.
However, some Freeware emulators survive - the following page seems to
have a fairly good list of what's available and in what state of
development:
http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/psx/
One of the problems with these emulators is they tend to require
things such as a Sony BIOS image, which is protected by copyright law
and therefore cannot be distributed. There are potentially ways around
this, but they may be difficult and illegal.
Overall game emulation is a murky area when it comes to the law -
original manufacturers own a lot of intellectual property in relation
to the way their systems work, and at least some of this has to be
copied to make emulation possible.
Here are some references pointing to what is and was available
commercially:
http://www.game-revolution.com/download/emulator/playstation.htm
http://www.gamesdomain.com/articles/12.html
A terse history of the commercial emulator market from The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22910.html
I hope this answers your question. In summary, yes they are available,
however the difficulties involved in using them may outweigh some of
the benefits.
Regards,
sycophant-ga |
