Play!'s September 2021 Progress Report (PS2 emulator)
Yet another month where I could barely sleep with the amount of improvements, but games needs testing and someone had to do it! We had rendering improvements that made some games playable, some other rendering improvements that fixed some details in games that were already playable (but now are looking much better), better compatibility in general with the latest results I've reported to the tracker, some changes on the android version (related to vulkan and how loading/listing your games works), also including the fix of some common crashes that were reported recently. Let's highlight the major changes first:
Viewport improvements
With the improvements in how some unconventional CRT configurations are handled, games that had issues rendering at the correct aspect (to cover the entire screen instead of only the top or lower half) are now fixed. Games that were affected by this issue include:
Metal Slug 4
Metal Slug 5
Silent Hill 2 (only the US region, PAL already rendered correctly)
Silent Hill 3
Trizeal
Android: Added a new 'Add Folder' button
In preparation for some future changes, there's now this button to allow you to manually add your games folder to the emulator. This is part of the work being done to support some of the mess introduced by Android 11 known as scoped storage. Note: since some of these changes affect how the emulator can access your files, Play! will no longer automatically scan your device for games, you'll have to add them manually, once the changes are in effect.
M1 MacOS support
This is a big one that I've missed mentioning for the last report, but here we are, M1 is supported and tests are welcome.
Enabled vulkan on arm64 board
NVidia boards that have TX1+ SoC now have the vulkan backend available since they have support for the shader interlock needed to function.
New playable games
Probably what most people really want to know, what can we play now till the very end with no gamebreaking issues? Here's the list:
Crazy Frog Racer
Street Fighter EX3
Chaos Field
Psikyo Shooting Collection Vol. 2: Sengoku Ace & Sengoku Blade
Dragon Blaze
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos
Mojo!
Guilty Gear X Plus
Street Fighter 3 Third Strike
Spectral Vs Generation
Capcom Fighting Jam
Guilty Gear XX Slash: The Midnight Carnival
Psyvariar - Complete Edition
Guilty Gear XX #Reload - The Midnight Carnival
Metal Slug 4
As always, all the results listed here were previously reported to the compatibility tracker https://github.com/jpd002/Play-Compatibility/issues .
If you want to support the developer of this emulator, you can do so via Patreon https://patreon.com/jpd002 . If you appreciate the work I do testing games and making these short reports, well, you know what to do ;)
PS: as someone asked me previously, you can check every single change that made into the main code of the project here https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/commits/master