play! progress report (02/08/2025)
We're almost at the end of our Shadow Hearts journey: Shadow Hearts 1 became playable, Shadow Hearts: Covenant got it's time and now only Shadow Hearts: From the New World is left. As usual, the games from this series suffer from being too sensitive to seek timings while trying to read information from the disc, so time and time again I had my adventure cut short with a hang (and a horrible taste in my mouth when I remembered the last time I had saved...). Let's see what improved first, then we'll go into more details.
New verified playable games [06/2025]:
Shadow Hearts
Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 2
Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 3
Shadow Hearts: two issues were found and fixed: performance and lottery mini-game hanging. For the performance, we had a new idle patch added (there's still some work to be done to have the game running even better, but it's rendering related and will not be addressed at this time). The lottery mini-game isn't exactly mandatory to finish the game, but it's very useful to obtain some neat and unique items. At the end of the mini-game, play! would hang there forever, which is an issue also present if you try to play the game with some models of the PS3 console (earlier models had more of the original PS2 hardware included to be able to play PS2 games, later models removed the parts and went with software emulation instead, which introduced the issue). With this fixed, the game can now be fully enjoyed.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant: performance wasn't an issue with this game, but the timings came once again to bite us in the ass with "random" hangings here and there. A new change to the timings made the entire game playable, which lead us to our mention of...
Shadow Hearts: From the New World: I know, I know, I didn't listed the game above, so why it's mentioned here? Well, the game shares the same issues with sensitive timings, so it was the obvious choice for my next game to test. So far the timings were changed 3 times, with each change I've experienced less and less frequent issues (cross your finger for this being the last one, because I'm really far into the game already). So we can bet on this bad boy being playable for the next report.
Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 2 and 3: while the issue on those games weren't gamebreaking, they were for sure annoying to see (water and ground textures were all messed up). With this issue fixed (and blame me, since I have no clue which exact change improved the rendering of the games). All looking good and finally fully enjoyable.
I'll continue with my Shadow Hearts saga, hoping for the best for the next month, but there's something else I want to mention which isn't exactly emulation related: muh products. For some time now I've been making laser engraved art on wood, just recently started engraving games/fantasy (e.g. Middle-Earth and Skyrim) maps on fake leather as well for sale. These are things I enjoy doing a lot and I had the idea to share both the results and showcase them for sale here as well (daddy needs a new PC badly). Prices are something I can for sure say are low compared to similar stuff I saw online for sale, but my main concern is shipping (I'm from Brazil, so for anyone not from my country the shipping could be, well, not a very good deal). In some days I'll make a new article with more details about it, but feel free to share your opinion or if you're interested this kind of stuff.
Thanks again for all the support so far and see you all... in a couple of days ;)
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