Bleem! was a really unique product for its time, allowing users to run PlayStation games on non-PlayStation hardware. Originally created with Windows-based PCs in mind, Bleem! would later come to the Sega Dreamcast as Bleemcast – a move which Sega was covertly in favour of.
Randy Linden, the programmer behind Bleem!, has been speaking to Zophar (founder of Zophar’s Domain, naturally) about his career and explains that, while Sega wasn't going to go as far as to give Bleemcast its official blessing, it was very keen to see it come to Dreamcast.
Linden explains that Bleem president David Herpolsheimer asked him about the idea of porting the emulator to the new console:
"I took a look at the specs for the Dreamcast and thought, 'Yeah, it could be done. Absolutely. Let's get in contact with Sega.' So, we got in contact with Sega, and Sega was thrilled at the idea, and they sent us all the technical specs for the Dreamcast. They loaned us a Dreamcast hardware development system, including a GD-ROM writer and all the necessary software to do the development."
However, it would seem that Sega decided plausible deniability was the best approach and refused to allow Linden and his team to use the GD-ROM format for Bleemcast.
Linden shares his thoughts on why this was the case:
"They did not want the title to be licensed officially by Sega. Because they didn't want to get into a big legal battle with Sony. They would happily license the GD-ROM format and allow us to use their libraries, their code, their whatever, if we got permission from Sony, right? Which was not going to happen. So that meant that everything written for Bleemcast was written from the ground up.
There are no Sega libraries that are used. There's no Sega code that is used. There's no Sony code that's used, either. But Sega would not license the technology that they had developed for talking to the chips to the hardware. So that's why they sent along all the low-level technical specs, and technical documentation for all the hardware on the Sega Dreamcast."
Thankfully, Linden was able to hit upon a solution. "I had to reverse engineer the Sega BIOS, so I dug into that and discovered the 'Mil-CD' somebody at Sega said you should go to Japan and buy. They sort of told us with, you know, a 'nudge nudge wink wink', to buy Heartbreak Diaries." Mil-CDs, in case you didn't know, were a way to add multimedia features to traditional CD-ROM discs, such as menus, internet options, and more.
Heartbreak Diaries was a Mil-CD that was released in Japan, but it wasn't released anywhere else in the world, and it was a Dreamcast title that had boot code on the Dreamcast," says Linden.
"It was intended as an alternate revenue stream for Sega because you could release videos and small programs and things like that on the Dreamcast, but it was a standard manufacturing process to create a Mil-CD. But of course, they didn't want anybody to know about it."
This loophole allowed not only the creation and release of Bleemcast on a standard CD, but also the Utopia bootdisk and self-booting CD-R copies of Dreamcast games.