Pentium III: trying out Connectix Virtual Game Station (Windows98)

#Connectix #Playstation #CVGS

Connectix was famous for its virtualization techniques, they were the force behind Virtual PC. In the late 90s they virtualized the Sony PlayStation. Which was quite revolutionary as it was a current gen console and it made regular PCs perfectly capable of running just about any PlayStation game straight from the disc.

This emulator only runs on Windows9x but it was patched to run on Windows XP by the community. Even community patched and enhanced versions exist.

It primarily was a thing on the iMac actually. During on of the Mac conferences Steve Jobs showed off a Mac running a PlayStation game in 1999. It could run full speed on a 233Mhz iMac G3 but it did need the built-in ATi graphics card. I have an old iMac Snow which is a lot faster and sports the same GPU, I need to check if I can get it to run on that machine too – I do need to get MacOS 9 classic on the machine though as it won’t run on the OS X variants of MacOS. In around 2000 the program received a Windows 9x port which only runs on Windows, a patched binary was compatible with Windows XP.

Sony didn’t take kindly to it, sued Connectix but lost and ended up buying Connectix and subsequently let CVGS die.

Bleem is another PlayStation emulator from different roots. I did have that too back in the day. Should have a looksee if I can find it. Bleem was also sued by Sony and again Sony lost the court case and emulation was rendered fair use/ legal. The legal fees forced Bleem out of business and the programmer of the emulator Randy Linden actually ended up working for Sony – he is rumored to have contributed to later PlayStations being backwards compatible.

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