Yikes.. Weird and inacurate speculations!
Amberion
Yep, that's how IBM lost the monopoly on PC's. Someone reverse engineered their BIOS, gave away the specs and someone else used those docs to write a completely original BIOS that would do the same thing. Considering how big PC's are today, this can only be a good thing.
Amberion
This is actually not true.
What happened is IBM published there bios API specs and people copied them. Phionex bios was the first clean room Bios ever made. They basically took a bunch of programers who never saw IBM's source code for the bios and put them in a room with the specs and said "MAKE IT WORK!" That's what happened.
Frosty840
Any argument Sony had against emulation went out of the window when they allowed the publication of the Final Fantasy Classics games, which are all emulations of the original SNES ROMs.
This is erroneous.. they are PORTS of the Original SNES code to the Sony Playstation using the original sprite art work files etc. That's all they are NOT EMULATED. It's a port huge difference
However..
Sony bought and distributed in Feb of 1999 an emulator when they had production difficulties on the initial systems for developers on the PS2. Cygnus systems wrote it to run on high End PCS and workstations. The emulator was about 1/100th or 1/1000th of the speed of a PS2, however it did allow the developers to develope games quickly (See reduced polygon counts and frame skipping) because of a lack of anything else to develope using. Bottom line is Sony HAD to use an emulator for the titles the year of the PS2's initial release to get something to developers so there would be games for there platform.
I believe the real problem lies with the CEO's control problem, he seems to be the kind of man who wants to control everything around him. Hence lawsuits.. proprietary BETA MAX video tape going by by and many other things that Sony has done that went that way. Sony also tends to make things that are hard to repair (IE you have to almost buy a new one if they break). Sony makes great equipement and has excelent technical staff.. it's behavior toward other people is a reflection of the person in charge.. enough said about it.
As for a cloned bios, that's what VGS and Bleem did, they take the Bios calls and emulate them so that calls to the bios functions skip using real MIPS R3000 code in the Playstation bios. They directly execute high level functions natively on your computer in the PSX emulator. This allows for things like reading the memory cards, accessing the CDROM etc. I believe FPSE (the code I have for it at least does) had some preliminary work done in this area, however it was buggy and hadn't progressed very far. IE it didn't work on anything but demos. I spent a few weeks working on getting it to work (I use Linux IE no plugins for it at the time
). I did eliminate a few bugs but it was not easy. Bleem and VGS did a good job at this probably because they tackled this problem first before getting anything else to work.
Cyb
