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February 2, 2025
PS2playemulation

Amazing 2025 January play! progress report? Amazing 2025 January play! report!

A bit late but oh boy, I'm even more excited than I was in December. This is legit Christmas 2.0, since we got exactly the same amount of new playable games, some other games with progress in another statuses + a new "game config" system that allows us to fix some problems faster than ever, allowing more games to improve while documenting some common issues.

New verified playable games [01/2025]:

  • Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku o: Melody of the Sun and Sea

  • Chou Kousoku Reversi

  • Chou Kousoku Shougi

  • Ring of Red

  • Densha de Go! Professional 2

  • Pure x Cure Recovery

  • Sugar + Spice! Ano Ko no Suteki na Nani mo Kamo

  • Togainu no Chi: True Blood

  • Lime-iro Senkitan Jun - Meiji Nihon, Otome Sakimorisu

  • Romancing SaGa

  • The Incredible Hulk - Ultimate Destruction

  • Mega Man X: Command Mission

  • Ratatouille

  • Chulip

  • Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 4

  • Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 5

  • Medal of Honor Frontline

  • Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles 2

  • Onimusha: Warlords

  • Blood Omen 2 - The Legacy of Kain Series

From this list, Onimusha: Warlords was the first game in play! to make use of the brand new Game Config system, so let's talk about it...

Game Config System

The tldr is: it's a per game patch system loading specific patches from an external file. This replaces the older "patches.xml" file in play!'s directory with a new "GameConfig.xml", but in general the file itself isn't that special. What's special is the new changes on the emulator itself to support changing the "rounding mode" and finding the correct memory block where idle skips happen, as well as some specific addresses where "something weird" can happen to make a game hang or behave incorrectly. The rounding mode changes allow us to change the results of some calculations to get a closer result to what the game expects and needs to work in some points (due to how the PS2 CPU works, you won't always get the same values as you would in your regular PC CPU, forcing you to round the value in some ways to get an approximation instead).

The idle skip detection part is even more interesting since performance was an issue that plagued the most intensive games for years. Idle skipping is simply detecting a block of code that does "nothing" for long periods of time, but this nothing keeps your CPU busy regardless of doing... nothing. If we're able to detect that such code blocks do nothing and "ignore" them, we can many times drop the emulated CPU usage from 99% to something closer to the usage on the real hardware, most of the time giving us an amazing performance boost (e.g. the Blood Will Tell case, where the performance was improved around 220%).

The other kind of patches are mostly "oh, we've found this weird behavior in this specific game, so let's patch it to work around the game hanging and document the issue for future studies" kind of stuff. There's no generic code in place to detect the idle skip blocks in all games, but this approach at least help us to understand them better so in the future such patches can be probably removed, same for the other patches in general.

All playables out of the way, so let's take a look at some other statuses improvements that didn't reached that point yet:

  • Nuga-Cel! Nurture Garment Celebration: Promoted from "Intros" to "In-Game"

  • Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer: Promoted from "Intros" to "In-Game"

  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PAL): Promoted from "Loadable" to "In-Game"

  • Dead or Alive 2 (JP): Promoted from "Loadable" to "In-Game"

  • Pitfall - The Lost Expedition: Promoted from "Loadable" to "In-Game"

  • Yourself Fitness: Promoted from "Loadable" to "Intros"

  • NCAA Football 2003: Promoted from "Loadable" to "In-Game"

  • DreamWorks Over the Hedge: Promoted from "Loadable" to "Intros"

  • Rhythmic Star!: Promoted from "Loadable" to "Intros"

Phew, what a month! This second rush to get as much playables reported almost killed me (not really, just 50% joking here), as I had to go to bed really late to have enough hours of testing, so I'll try to take things slowly in February (I'll be poking at those games that get Game Config patches and some of my backlog tagged as "Needs Testing" on the tracker), but we'll probably get interesting results anyway (almost done with another game by the time I'm making this report). That's all for now, I hope you all enjoyed the read and the results, see you all next month <3

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