play! compatibility/progress report (01/08/2024)
We have a lot to talk about this month: major compatibility improvements, some performance improvements, game of the month results and news on the arcade side of things. Most of our compatibility bump came from me finally being able to check on the Buzzer controller games since this device is now supported. Even if not all games that are compatible with this specific controller are playable for now (some of the main series still have input issues and Disney's Th!nk Fast has some timing issues related to sound emulator, still not fixed), most of them are. So let's jump into the interesting results!
Game of the Month: Commandos - Strike Force
The game selected by the users as Game of the Month was Commandos - Strike Force, one of the games I was already insterested into finishing but never had the patience to since the performance would take too much of my time (I would probably be able to finish 3 games in the time I would need to probably finish this one). The most common gamebreaking issue we had with rendering was fixed some months ago, so performance was the only major blocker here. After some time and many attempts, the developer was able to make a bunch of improvements: one being an attempt to detect the idle skipping properly (this game behaves weirdly when it comes to that, so a game specific patch was made for now), and others being general improvements to the native code generation. With all this in place, the game went from running between 9 to 10 fps to 14 to 15... so still not enough, even if it's a big 55% performance improvement. For now we'll still keep it listed as In-Game, but also with the code improvement we got performance boosts in many other games, some results being:
Futurama: 3.8%
King’s Field IV: 3.7%
Predator - Concrete Jungle: 2.7%
Need for Speed Underground: 6.25%
Van Helsing: 3.57%
Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution: 7.14%
New verified playable games:
Gladius
Buzz! Brain of the UK
Buzz! Brain of Oz
Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz
Buzz! The Pop Quiz
Buzz! The Mega Quiz
Buzz! The Sports Quiz
Buzz! The Music Quiz
Buzz! Brain of the World
Captain Scarlet
Unreal Tournament
Happy Feet
Simple 2000 Series Vol. 34 - The Ren'ai Horror Adventure - Hyouryuu Shoujo
Gladius: I had an unhealthy amount of hours testing this game (like... 150+ hours levels of unhealthy). There's two issues that will probably be obvious, second one depending on how you play the game. First is a rendering issue: waterfall effects will not be blocked by the terrain geometry at the world's map, which is also probably related to the hair of a specific class of character being fully transparent. Not gamebreaking, just distracting. The second one is save state related: if you abuse save states, you could cause a softlock (being unable to progress in any way), trying to talk to any NPC will not display the text keeping you from being able to close the dialog window, so be aware and save in-game all the time to prevent your progress from being gone.
Buzz! series: almost all games work as they should since the support for the new input device was added, there's only 2 broken ones (input issue with the button "hold" even if you just press it once at the menus), and the previously mentioned Disney's Th!nk Fast being annoying with sound timing issues.
Captain Scarlet: nothing special here, just didn't had time to previously test it once it got in-game some months ago
Unreal Tournament and Happy Feet: UT was one of the first games I've ever tested with play and since a regression I couldn't get in-game anymore. Many attempts were made in the past to find out what was the issue and in the end it was also sound emulation related. As a nice bonus, the same fix also made Happy Feet no longer hang at a specific point, making this fix a combo of 2 new playables.
Simple 2000 Series Vol. 34: yet another case of "it got in-game, but I'll look at it later", from some months ago.
Let's talk arcade for a minute...
For a long time now, play! is known for it's support for some arcade systems that use pretty much the same hardware as the original PS2 console (with some extras, specially on the input side of things), but we never had an official place where users could check the compatibility. While we still don't have the games listed in our official tracker (something I'll try to fix this month), I've made my own site to list all the games for the NAMCO System 246/256. In this site you'll find a list with all the games (including those that aren't released and those still undumped), with the regular status we already know (nothing, intro, in-game, playable) + some extra information to make it clear about how well it works (if it's booting, how's the sound emulation, visual issues and performance), making sure that the ratings show the real quality of the emulation for each game. I know it doesn't look great but I guess it's something. Here's the link and keep in mind that I'll still focus more time on the PS2 side of things, but for each month I want to update at least 2 new games on the site (the list isn't that long, so it shouldn't take much time to cover everything): https://literalmente-game.github.io/compatibility_lists/arcade.html
And that's all folks, I have a ton of new games to test already for next month that I've verified as improvements from recent compatibility changes, so expect another interesting boost in that side of things, as well for the next Game of the Month that should be up for voting... NOW: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfrGGm9GxgwWgvPRfC7MtS1H6p5VrIP-upuVd-j81tqT2DChw/viewform
I hope you all enjoyed the content of this month's report and as always thx for the support ;)
Useful Links
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002