Last week at the Macworld Expo, Connectix announced its Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for G3-equipped Macintosh computers. The program plays most of the top PlayStation games, with compatibility for most of the newer titles. This is the first time a company has developed an emulator for commercial sale that plays games in their original format (in this case, on CD-ROMs).

　　Roy McDonald, president and CEO of Connectix Corp., told GameSpot News Monday morning that Sony has not filed any legal action against the company. "They would have no basis for any legal action since we haven't used any of their software copyrights in the creation of the Virtual Game Station. It's been found in the past that software emulation of a hardware system does not violate patent law."

　　It was widely reported on web sites this weekend that Sony had filed legal action against the company, but there are no signs that it has happened yet. We were unable to reach anyone from Sony Computer Entertainment America to comment on whether it had in fact filed anything. Either way, this doesn't mean that Sony won't eventually try to prevent Connectix from selling the Virtual Game Station to the public. The PlayStation is Sony's baby, and we'd be surprised if Sony let the emulator go to market without trying a Nintendo/Game Genie preventative measure to stop it from being sold, regardless of whether Connectix is in the legal right or not.

　　McDonald told us that the company is developing a PC version of the Virtual Game Station, but there is no word on availability yet. The Mac version will be released later this spring (it is trying to refine the program's compatibility to include more titles). Version 1.0 of the VGS was sold at Macworld - the first commercial version will be 1.01.

　　Connectix's Virtual Game Station will not be the only commercially available PlayStation emulator on the market this year. Another group of programmers is working on Bleem, a PC-based PlayStation emulator for Windows that can run PS games in a window and supports various 3D cards to enhance the graphics of the games.