play! progress report (01/05/2026) + some very good news
This month the amount of games that became playable are slightly less exciting than what I've (finally) learned to do. The tldr: I can improve the performance of many games by myself without the need to ask the actual developer when a game have unusual usage of the EE (the PS2 CPU). More details and what you should expect from my work down on this article, for now the usual new playable stuff:
New verified playable games [04/2025]:
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2
Under the Moon - Crescent
Zoids: Struggle
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: similar to the first game on the series, this just needed some (many...) hours to complete a 100% test. It performs almost the same as the first game, but it's running slightly better.
Under the Moon - Crescent: this was already on my list since December of the last year, finally fully verified with no issues.
Zoids: Struggle: last console version of the series left untested, now fully verified. Performance isn't as good as it should be, but there's no gamebreaking issues.
INCOMING: a lot of idle skip patches!
The most important thing this month is the fact that I've learned (thanks to the actual developer of play!) to create my own idle skip patches. Many games waste a ton of time/cycles doing instructions that do... nothing. Yeap, exactly: blocks of nothing wasting our precious emulated CPU time and the consequence is that performance goes bad for no actual good reason. While there is a code in play! that does this idling detection on it's own, it's sadly not able to get all of them, so many games are running much slower than they should. Some time ago the developer added the lovely idle patches support so if you can find the precise address on the emulated PS2 memory which holds the instructions idling, there's usually a nice performance boost.
And that's what I've been doing for this past week: hunting down every single game that has unusual high EE usage and poking at all possible memory address looking for performance improvements. In some games there's more than just that as the main bottleneck: Zoids Struggle is a good example, where even with the EE usage "fixed", we only got 2 to 4 more fps, which means the main issue is probably VU related instead. BUT, in games like Obscure or Obscure 2... pretty much a +100% improvement!
So I'm finally able to contribute a bit more than just testing results... but this will require even more time testing since I need to double check even games that were verified as playables to be sure I didn't broke the game itself with my black magic patches.
That's all for now, excited to share my results on the next report, see you all and thx for the support <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
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