play! progress report (01/03/2025)
As mentioned at the previous report, I've decided to take things slowly this month... but that somehow didn't worked out since I actually put more hours into testing because of my bad decision to include a 100+ hours RPG in my list. Ok, at some point I would need to do it anyway, so one down from that painful list.
New verified playable games:
Blood Will Tell - Tezuka Osamu's Dororo
Stretch Panic
Mizuiro
The Bard's Tale
The Sopranos: Road to Respect
Dynasty Tactics 2
Franklin the Turtle: A Birthday Surprise
Dragon Quest VIII
Stretch Panic, Mizuiro, The Bard's Tale, The Sopranos, Dynasty Tactics 2 and Franklin the Turtle were just a matter of "I need to finish them to confirm they're playable.
Blood Will Tell was a more interesting case: the gamebreaking issue was related to a calculation that was done incorrectly, breaking the behavior of a specific boss that made him immortal (at some point in the fight he would just start running with his face against the walls of the arena, not taking any hits). With a change made to clamp the calculation values to the correct range, the entire game became playable, but there's a bonus with that as well: since I had to start the game from zero instead of resuming from a save (with this kind of code change, I usually start the game again to be extra sure nothing else broke), the developer also figured out the correct way to detect the idle blocks of code, giving us a very good performance boost, so it's playable and much more enjoyable than the experience I had previously.
Dragon Quest VIII was extra painful because somehow I had deleted my save game... with around 60 hours of progress already done. As I remembered, we had some visual issues with the game so I was motivated enough to at least try to complete the game regardless of all that time wasted. Said and done, game finished with almost 160 hours played (really, coffee isn't cutting it anymore...). This includes the entire main story + almost all the post game stuff and side quests. With some save states provided to the developer, he was able to better understand some of the visual issues, so a fix for at least the most imersion breaking ones should show up soon on the repository.
Other than those games, I also put some hours into Knights of the Temple. This game has always been a mess collision wise with play! (walking around the first areas of the game would end up with your character stuck on the floor and unable to move/progress past a specific point). The developer made a patch for that and I was able to progress some levels with no other issues... and then I had the issue again at some other point. Most of my progress took longer than it should because I was intentionally walking over every single pixel on every single room trying to find any other spot where the game would trap the player on the floor due to broken collisions, so the developer had to patch a lot of specific memory addresses. Sadly, this came to a roadblock where this approach just couldn't be applied anymore. Even more depressing is the fact that this was 4 levels away from finishing the game, so we'll have to wait a bit longer until this is properly fixed.
On the global side of things, there's some small optimizations here and there done and being worked on (specially on the VU, to improve performance when rendering is the bottleneck).
Oh, still on that note: Star Wars: Battlefront is famously a slideshow with play!, so a patch to detect idle blocks of code was added as well (I couldn't put my hands on it so far, but the numbers provided by the developer himself were around a 54% improvement).
And the last game specific improvement is... Final Fantasy X. The game used to hang after a cutscene with Yuna, and that's no longer preventing me from progressing, so it's yet another long RPG to keep me awake for the next month.
That's all for now folks, I'll be buring myself into nonstop grinding (ok, not really...) until the end of the month, wish me luck with all those critical hits and see you all soon ;)
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