play's 2024 final report! (30/12/2024)
A lot of work was put into reaching where we're at right now: many PS2 features were implemented to cover specific games, lot's of old implementations were improved to fit the behavior of multiple games (in the case where they're made with a specific game in mind as a test case and then later better understood and made accurate to cover more cases), performance gains, major compatibility gains and some general quality of life improvements. To start the report I would like to show the compatibility data we have today compared to the first month of this same year:
63 new games added to the tracker
"Nothing" status went from 2 to only 1 game (there's already an idea to fix that last game)
"Loadable" went down 12 games
"Intro" went down 14 games
"In-Game" went down 58 games
"Playable" had an increase of 140 games
So as we can see, we had a total of 140 playable games this year, an avg of 11 new playable games per month!
Performance
While testing a specific game (Legaia 2), I had noticed that the performance wasn't making a lot of sense compared to similar games I've checked on the past: while the EE (Emotion Engine, the PS2 CPU) usage was low (around 30% at best), the framerate wasn't as good as it could be... so it was time to poke at what was causing the bottleneck. Regular builds of the emulator can show some data at the right corner of the screen, but that doesn't show the complete picture, so I've asked a developer (yes, I'm talking about you Zer0xFF) to compile me a recent debug build for the rest of the details. Said and done, the bottleneck was the VU usage instead (GPU side being hit hard for some reason). That being reported, a week later we had a bunch of changes on the code related to the VU emulation, made across multiple branches (can be verified here https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/tree/vu_mem_access_masked and here https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/tree/vu_broadcast_elem ). With those in place, it was enough to give the game a nice 12.5% performance improvement. And even if this was the game I was testing and my main focus, this also affected most games that were GPU bottenecked in some ways (few % gained on Shadow of the Colossus, some other games got a few fps on avg here and there). For now this was enough to allow me to finish the game without major issues at the most critical points, but expect future improments on that side since I've noticed that'll be still a bottleneck that can be reduced (Shadow of the Colossus is a great benchmark for that).
New verified playable games:
Bomberman Hardbal
Apocripha-0
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
Bomberman Battles
Blood+ - One Night Kiss
Kino no Tabi II: The Beautiful World
Kyuuketsu Kitan Moonties
Chou Kousoku Igo
Dead Eye Jim
Full House Kiss: Ren'ai Kaseifu Adventure
Full House Kiss 2 - Ren'ai Kaseifu Adventure
Berserk: Millennium Falcon-hen: Seima Senki no Shou
KOF2: Maximum Impact II
Disney/Pixar Cars
Bakushou!! Jinsei Kaidou: Nova Usagi ga Miteru zo!!
Chou Kousoku Mahjong
Jan Sangoku Musou
Keshikyun Puzzle: Atori Mahiro vs. Saitou Hajime vs. Noel vs. Hakkai
Legaia 2: Duel Saga
As a bonus compatibility wise, Poinie's Poin, that was previously on the "Nothing" status, now can reach in-game. With that game gone, now a single retail title remains in our list as "doing nothing but crashing during boot": Bouken Jidai Katsugeki: Goemon. The developer has planned a fix for it later in 2025, so we can expect the "Nothing" status to drop to... nothing. I mean, until I can find another game that's 100% broken ;)
Muh goals for 2025:
So much done, but still much more left to be done! Compatibility is probably my major goal as usual, since we can't complain about what we can't play, those are my "realistic" numbers:
Nothing: 0.00%
Loadable: 0.00%
Intro: 10.00%
In-Game: 35.00%
Playable: 50.00%+
Performance wise, it's hard to estimate in numbers what I would need since a ton of games can already run at stupidly hight framerate (like 180+ fps...), but those that don't run well would need, in avg, at least another 50% gain to run at fullspeed with a decent hardware, so let's go with around 25% on avg for a global improvement as a realistic goal.
Quality of life/presentation things I would like to have (not exactly for 2025, but in the future in general, and that's just a personal take, I'm sure most users want things that I'll not even mention here:
Debug data presented on the regular release builds (to make my work easier)
Cheats support (being raw cheats or something like Codebreaker/Gameshark)
Widescreen support via cheats (a specific option to enable them when available)
FPS cheats (same as above, to force games that run at 30 fps to run in 60 fps instead)
Vulkan upcaling (hard to do due to how vulkan rendering works, but still possible)
Readable log (the log files now are too verbose and technical, which makes them hard to be used by the user as a reference about what could be wrong when they find issues in the emulator, which also makes hard to give them proper support)
As a personal goal, I mostly just need to upgrade my hardware to be able to finish more games (and faster), and more storage since even while compressing games to CHD the PS2 library is just too huge for me to be able to have more than a few dumps around while testing. Not sure when that will happen, but they, it's my plan.
With all that said, the only thing left is to thank all of you that supported me for this entire year. It was not easy to put the amount of time I've did to testing and finishing each game, specially since I'm also working working and I arrive at home almost dead, but it's nice to see all this work helped the project a bit into the right direction and more people can enjoy more games because of this.
I hope you all have an amazing New Year's Eve (don't drink too much... but if you do, call me!)!
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