play! compatibility report (01/04/2024)
It's that time of the month again, with yet another bunch of progress to report. I've been into my "horror mood" for some time since I've finished Fatal Frame 1 last month, so the obvious choice among the PS2 library was the sequel. All fine until the first... 10 seconds in-game: the voice started to loop in the most irritating way, but I had to progress past this. With the sound disabled I've made yet another 10 seconds to a point where I would reach a new area aaaand... the emulator hanged. Ok, I'm not even mad (lies...), after some few days of my report the game issue was fixed (and yes, it was sound related). No more sound loops, no more hanging, game worked fine until the very end and yay, yet another playable for our list. Next? Fatal Frame III obviously, I'm not done with my ghost hunting hype! Similar to the looping sound issue from Fatal Frame II, the third game on the series had the same issue with some specific voice lines looping nonstop, but the fix from the second game fixed this. So nothing else could go wrong, right? Nope, after some hours playing, at the point where you need to listen to a tape in-game to be able to progress, not only the character became invisible but we also had a nice soft lock (game was running, but there's nothing you could do to progress). Time to make another report and some days later the developer made a branch of the project with a fix and nothing else went wrong with the game, another win for the compatibility list. Please note that this fix was not yet merged, but you can download a version with the improvement from here if you're interested in playing the game right now and don't want to wait [LINK]. This was most of my back and forth development wise, the rest of the list below "just worked", so my efforts were only putting the hours into testing every single game and finishing them to confirm they're playable.
New verified playable games:
The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match
Impossible Mission
Cherry Blossom
Under the Skin
Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter
Mercury Meltdown Remix
Colin McRae Rally 3
Colin McRae Rally 04
Dance Dance Revolution X
GTC Africa
Michigan: Report from Hell
Genji - Dawn of the Samurai
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
Gregory Horror Show
Once again, thank you all for supporting my work and expect for something extra (probably) this month. Without going into many details, specially since I've barely started working on this, but I'll try to make some small articles as some sort of "Game Development Diary", where I'll talk about my attempt at making my own game. See you all next month ;)
Useful links:
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002