July 2, 2025

play! progress report (01/07/2025)

You're all probably tired of reading "hey, I've played [insert game name here] for [insert ungodly amount of hours here], but that was the case again! The game this time was Tales of the Abyss. Taking advantage of the recently added patch to improve it's performance, I did everything possible in the game (yes, even all those mostly boring side quests), and finally promoted it to playable. This specific game is an RPG but with real time battles, which made this many hours of usage of the analog sitck on my DS4 controller finally cause the cursed drift (not a lot, but it made much harder to even walk properly without doing some extra efforth to stay on the correct path sometimes). With this and some other games finished, we've reached 47.58% total of playable games (including all the games reported so far + some new entries), from a grand total of 2608 games.

New verified playable games [06/2025]:

Phantom Brave
Nickelodeon Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom
Nickelodeon SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
Oretachi Geesen Zoku: Quarth
Osouji Sentai Clean Keeper H
Tales of the Abyss

Phantom Brave: visual issues fixed (some of the geometry was invisible in older versions of the emulator), so I just had to grind my way (not that much...) till the end.

Nickelodeon Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom: previosly unable to save, but now the entire game works properly.

Nickelodeon SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab: also previously unable to save, slow and with many visual issues... and all of that fixed!

Oretachi Geesen Zoku: Quarth and Osouji Sentai Clean Keeper H: both previously checked as in-game but never reported because [LAZY], but now both were finally fully verified and promoted to playables.

Tales of the Abyss: performance issues fixed and the entire game was verified this month, +1 to us.

With all those games finished, I've decided to check on Shadow Hearts next: the game works fine and... oh, it runs almost twice as fast with OpenGL instead of Vulkan?! Yeap, this game uses pre rendered (static images, most of the time) for the backgrounds, while having characters and some other minor details on the scenes as real time 3D, so what's going on? First thing that caught my attention was the EE (PS2 CPU) usage: 99 to 100% all the time. This is very weird since there's not a lot going on to cause this, so I've asked the developer to check and he found a specific memory address to create an idle patch. Even with this patch (which actually improved performance), the difference between both APIs performance was still too huge to ignore (we're talking about 100% difference in most scenes). While checking on OpenGL, I've found that most scenes on the game are trying to do 1800+ draw calls per frame and yes, this is with static backgrounds. The developer looked into it a bit further and looks like the game is trying to load the same assets to memory over and over again, hundreds of times per frame per object, so that's a behaviour that he'll have to address later to make vulkan run at least at the same performance as OpenGL. This is important not only for the sake of performance, but also because vulkan is the only API at the moment that renders this game transparency/blending effects to prevent issues like characters being rendered behind the scenario and incorrect battle transition effects. Bonus issue: the lottery mini game was also broken, but this a known issue that even happens on some models of PS3 due to later models not having an actual PS2 EE hardware included. At least this issue was also fixed with another patch, so only the rendering performance issue is left to have the game fully playable at fullspeed on most hardwares. Oh, almost forgot: I'm already at 50% of the game at this point, so as soon as the fix is available, I'm sure this will be another +1 for us as well!

I would like to thank everyone for their support, you can't imagine how much this matters to me, 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