I figured I was a damn genius. “Hey, I know, I’ll just email myself my saved game files from my VMU memory card! Then I can erase them from my VMU! Why didn’t SEGA tell us about this? Why don’t more people do this? Why not? Oh, it’s probably because I’m so much smarter than everyone else!”
Well I did this and I did get it to work. However, I discovered that the real reason people usually don’t do this has nothing to do with people being unintelligent, not does it have anything to do with SEGA being greedy jerks and wanting to keep people buying memory cards. No, the reason people generally don’t do this is because IT’S MIND-NUMBINGLY TEDIOUS!!!
To start, something I discovered just prior to doing this whole bit was the fact that the DC’s browser only knows how to interpret emails it sent. Basically, I used the DC’s browser to attach a file to an email message. I then forwarded that message back to the account I checked with my DC and it worked. However, if I conjured up a new email on my PC with the same file, it wouldn’t work – it would display the attached file as text (gibberish, basically). What this means is that I have to keep these exact emails on my system. There is a rather bizarre method of making the files such that they can be downloaded from a web page, but it’s even more bizarre and tedious.
This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that it’s kinda spooky that I could lose my saved games if my email file got corrupted in Outlook. For redundancy’s sake, I sent a CC: to a hotmail account. And even all of this wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that the emailing process doesn’t always work. After ramming my head into a wall several times, I basically discovered that the Web Browser’s email system is HTML based off of the disc, and after sending out a few emails, the files become corrupt. When they show up on my end, they’re screwed up. The only way to fix it is to reboot the browser. Lame. It took me 2.5 hours to back up approximately 1MB spread out over 2 cards.
So then I formatted one of my cards with GT2 running under bleemcast!, and I’m wondering – a standard PSX card has 15 “blocks” – does a VMU formatted as a PSX card also have 15 “blocks”, or does it have more? I dunno – but what is cool is that in the Dreamcast BIOS it shows the VMU as having no blocks free and with a giant “b!” over the card.
But alas, not all is good in bleemland – they announced that Metal Gear Solid, in the opinon of many the single best PSX game of all time, will be the next bleempak. However, they’re not 100% sure if they can afford to put it out without further retailer support. bleem has turned their website into a fighting force, with contact links to all of the major retailers out there and links to the DOJ to report Sony for antitrust. Do your part and go to www.bleem.com and send lots of nice emails to the retailers and the feds to let them know you want bleemcast! in their stores.
Oh, and PSXEmu.com uncovered a flash movie on the bleem site which would indicate that Tekken 3 might be bleempak #3. What a cool time to be alive.