Hey, remember Virtual Game Station? It's that keen Connectix product that got trotted out on stage at last year's Macworld Expo keynote in San Francisco. Basically, you load it up on your G3- or G4-based Mac, pop in one of many supported Playstation games, and while away the hours giving yourself various debilitating repetitive stress injuries. It was a huge hit at that Expo, we're told, with gazillions of copies being sold on the show floor. And Connectix managed to ship a slew of copies to retail outlets before Sony lowered the boom and slapped a lawsuit against Connectix, eventually securing a preliminary injunction preventing the company from manufacturing or shipping any more units.

Good news! Faithful viewer Jason Mazzotta was the first to notify us of Connectix's latest victory in the case. According to a Connectix press release, an appeals court has finally overturned the injunction, proclaiming that reverse engineering the Playstation in a clean-room environment (as Connectix claims to have done) is a "common, legitimate, and valuable development practice, protected under law." So basically, as long as Connectix didn't use any of Sony's actual intellectual property in Virtual Game Station's development, they're in the clear. Note that this still isn't the end of the case, just the reversal of the preliminary injunction; a Bloomberg article states that the actual trial begins this June.

So Connectix can start shipping copies of VGS again-- as if they needed to. Copies from the original shipment back before the injunction was handed down are still available in the retail channel; heck, we got our copy for a mere $20 from Outpost.com only a few weeks ago. (Now you know why eOnes are still available in the stores, months and months after the injunction against them was filed.) But now Connectix can ship its Windows version (shudder), and hopefully development will pick up and speed and compatibility will get even better. Mortal Kombat Trilogy runs flawlessly on our iBook, but Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a smidge choppy (though still incredibly fun). VGS gives us yet one more reason to love the iBook: it's a portable Playstation.