play! compatibility/progress report (01/09/2024)

I'll be honest that this month wasn't very good to me: got a terrible cold + messed up with my left arm at work (repetitive movement will do that to you at some point, but I didn't expected to not be able to even raise my arm without almost crying of pain so soon...), and as a nice bonus we had a ton of power outages in my region, which caused data damage to some local credentials leading to some of my accounts to simply becoming blocked (including my main e-mail, my second e-mail, Github login, Patreon and any social media as well). The accounts thing I could fix just 2 days ago, so that made me lose a bunch of time that I would otherwise be using to test and report results. Regardless of all this mess, the results of the month emulation related were quite nice: Game of the Month gave us improvements to multiple games, compatibility got that usual 10 games boost (11, if you count the second region of a specific game I've finished) and I've also found out that some of the performance improvements of the last month affected even more games in significant ways, so let's check our monthly wins:

Game of the Month: Sonic Unleashed

Probably a surprise to those than didn't interacted with the votes, but yeap, that was the most voted game this month. The main gamebreaking issue with the game was rendering: with vulkan there was a ton of stuff covering the screen, so menus and anything HUD related was looking corrupted or simply not visible (same for the menus and in-game), and with OpenGL those elements were visible but now we have tons of in-game visual issues instead. Issue reported to the developer and the fix was interesting: we had an incorrect implementation due to incorrect documentation of the decal mode. With that fixed, the game looks as good as it gets. I could finish some of the levels but didn't had enough time to finish the entire game for now, but that can be expected for the next report. While testing this fix, I've also found some other games improved as they've used the same rendering feature at some specific points:

Bloodrayne 2: videos before reaching in-game were just a black screen, now they're fully visible

Crash'N'Burn: minor in-game improvements (still looks like a messe, probably PATH3 related)

Destroy All Humans: major visual improvement, colors look correct now

Destroy All Humans 2: same as above ^

Bratz: Rock Angelz: shadows are now rendering correctly, performance improved

Max Payne: pre rendered videos and menus now visible with vulkan

New verified playable games:

• Wacky Races - Mad Motors

• Azur & Asmar

• Gadget & the Gadgetinis

• Yoake no Mariko

• Yoake no Mariko 2nd Act

• Micro Machines V4

• Malice

• Victorious Boxers 2 - Fighting Spirit

• MotorStorm - Arctic Edge

• Whiplash

Wacky Races - Mad Motors: just a matter of checking on it after a long time without anyone testing. Game runs with good performance and no noticeable visual issues.

Azur & Asmar: previously not reported to the tracker, just had time this month to finally finish it. Good performance with no noticeable visual issues.

Gadget & the Gadgetinis: in-game for the first time, working as good as it gets.

Yoake no Mariko 1 and 2: both previously untested, working well but still with some sound issues that will randomly show up (voices becoming distorted)

Micro Machines V4: for the first time in-game, running nicely with no visual issues.

Malice: finally able to play the entire thing, working with good performance almost all the time, only some drops here and there when there's a ton of geometry on the screen.

Victorious Boxers 2 - Fighting Spirit: previously unable to save/load, now every single feature works in the game (still running slower than it should due to probably incorrect idle detection).

MotorStorm - Arctic Edge: great game and working great as well. The only issue this game had was already fixed this month (geometry at the race selection screen was exploding). Bonus: the same fix for the race selection menu in this game also fixed the geometry explosion we had at the corner of the screen on the item list menu of the Chaos Legion game).

Whiplash: with the recent performance improvements I finally gave this game a try and it's working as it should. Both regions of the game were finished and reported to the tracker.

Arcade Testing

As previously mentioned, with all the issues I had there was not time left to finish the games I've wanted to update the arcade list side of things, but I'll try my best to fix that in the next week.

I had a talk with the developer and he agreed to hold the next numbered version release (0.67) until we hit 1200 playable games. This way we can reflect the improvements better than just presenting minor changes while making a new release (to be clear, every single new change can be still downloaded directly from Github, this is just a change in how the numbered version is presented, nothing else). That said, you can already vote for the next Game of the Month with this link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfrGGm9GxgwWgvPRfC7MtS1H6p5VrIP-upuVd-j81tqT2DChw/viewform and see you all next month ;)

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