yes, as in the infamous PS1 emulator that led to a legal case which ruled software like that as fair use.
for those unaware of who Piko are, they're a fairly notorious company that has gone out of their way to swallow up the rights to as many old games as humanly possible. with their most common use cases being licensing them out to cheap plug-n-play systems, and wrapping them in a basic emulator to dump onto Steam.
there's been some notable exceptions. a native version of Super 3-D Noah's Ark developed by someone who created the most popular Wolfenstein 3D source port, a brand new NES version of Jim Power that is legitimately better than the original game, and an upcoming remaster of O.D.T. built using Unreal Engine 5.
but more generally they function as a cheap way to legally get ROMs (all of their releases store them in the files completely unmodified and usable in any emulator) and nothing more.
they also have a history of doing some questionable things, most notably...
- filing a legal notice to preservation group Forest of Illusion after they released a prototype of Glover, claiming that the build was actually a revision of the final game they were working on doing an official re-release of. (it wasn't)
- acquiring the rights to the Genesis FPS Zero Tolerance and charging twelve dollars for the ROM, despite developer Technopop previously re-releasing it as freeware.
a kickstarter for this (combined with a video on demand service for some reason) was made last year, which completely tanked. though they insisted in the final update it would still happen in some form.
and so this is the end result, from what i can tell their solution was to outsource the technical side of things to GCast. a company which created an app for screencasting smartphone games onto a television (the CEO for the company previously worked on the defunct retro game subscription service "Piepacker" hence the connection).
the app is currently exclusive to iOS and Android and is completely free to use during the testing period, so i went to work on trying it out.
the technical side of things is exactly what you'd expect from their Steam releases. a bunch of Retroarch cores in a custom wrapper.
Genesis Plus GX for Genesis, Mupen 64 Plus for Nintendo 64, Nestopia for Nintendo Entertainment System, SNES9X for Super Nintendo, PCSX Rearmed for Playstation 1, and Final Burn Alpha for Neo Geo.
but the options are... unfortunate.
scaling ranges from "okay but not ideal" (NES, PS1) to "CHRIST WHY IS IT STRETCHED TO FILL THE SCREEN" (Genesis, Neo Geo.)
the only settings are stuck on a basic "in-game" menu. with just three save states and the ability to reset the game.
performance is mostly fine for most systems. there's one PS1 game (Legend) with severe audio delay, but N64 is completely busted.
crunchy audio and poor performance in some games, it should be noted that the hardware i'm using for testing (the 5th Generation iPad released in 2017) is fairly old. though it's still very jarring.
the full list of games isn't too bad, while Piko grabs literally anything. there's a few gems buried in there. (the press release says they're intending to work with "other publishers and IP owners" to add their content at some point in the future though, albeit seemingly requiring an additional subscription for each one.)
two odd highlights include the bizarre Road Raider. which originated as a original post-apocalyptic game. got a spiritual successor as an actual licensed Mad Max title, then got edited back to being original again. (should be noted this isn't the first "re-release" of the game, it's been in a few of the cheap plug-n-play systems.)
Piko has a history of doing this. with the most notorious example being a re-release of Barkley: Shut Up and Jam that replaced Charles Barkley with "Joe Hoops", a generic stock photo man. (oddly they inexplicably gave up on this IP and sold it to Atari)
then there's the one game that's genuinely broken. "Free Fall" for NES currently launches onto a screen of glitched graphics.
one thing to consider is that this is going into a market with some noteworthy competition, one that's a definite improvement by comparison, and one that's decidedly not so.
Antstream has a bigger lineup, including notable licenses such as Disney and Namco (Microsoft also licensed their tech for a "Retro Classics" app included with Game Pass). even being noted in a major Video Game History Foundation study as being the sole major source of C64 games that are still commercially available (4.5%, which would careen down to 0.75% if they ever shut down.)
but it has a fatal flaw in that the games are inexplicably being streamed from the cloud rather than running directly off your device. they're recently started doing more standard re-releases that run locally, but haven't made any plans to retrofit this functionality to the main service.
PicoPico originates from another established retro game publisher with a bit less of a chequered past, D4Enterprise (most notable for handling the MSX and Neo Geo emulators on the Wii Virtual Console)
while it's lineup leans toward titles that are generally only well known to Japanese gamers. it has a far better feature set including toggling buttons to autofire, properly integer scaled graphics, the ability to read the original instruction manuals for each title, and lets you directly live-stream your gameplay to NicoNico if you happen to upload videos there.
aesthetically it also reigns supreme. using lovely pixel art alongside having a menu theme created by legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro.
in terms of pricing Antstream (in theory) is the cheapest with a lifetime subscription that costs 100 dollars. while PicoPico* is 5 dollars a month on iOS, 4 dollars a month on Android. Piko hasn't devulged any exact pricing info on Bleemcast yet. though it's split into multiple tiers with one allegedly containing ads and one that's ad-free.
*i'd be remiss to not mention PicoPico is a spin-off of "Project Egg", which is a similar application for PC that contains a much larger library. the service costs 550 yen a month but is considerably more difficult to subscribe to outside Japan.
i would recommend just trying the service anyways during the free period for the heck of it. but apparently it was only meant to be playable during Gamescom and has already ended. though if you're on iOS you can still use it by going into the Testflight app and downgrading to a previous version.....
