Play!'s progress report, covering the latest months
Explanations about the channel and the results from Play!
As most people noticed, the channel didn't had any video in the latest months, for some reasons: in december I had to do an "emergency stop" to relax, and after this while I was truing to record the first podcast of the year, my mic simply gave up... and the attempt to buy a new one was just another failure (the one I got had too much noise and "robotic voice", not even with all edition in the world I would be able to utilize the audio from it). So all this time I was doing nothing? Quite the opposite: I never was as active as I was in the latest months, to the point that with only 15 days in december + the first week of the year was enough time for me to sleeplessly finish tons of PS2 games... with more than 60 games finished, bringing Play!'s compatibility from less than 250 playable games to more than 300. From visual novels to fighting games, passing through racing games and survival horror, certainly something that became playable will interest you ;)
More games are working... but what about the performance?
This is obviously one of the points that many people ask about, because even with the code in theory being very fast in many parts, in pratice there's still many bottlenecks that make the games run with performance below the expected. One of those factors that was touched recently is the idle skipping. Basicly, idle skipping means, on the PS2 CPU emulation, your code capability of detecting when certain instructions should do nothing instead of taking processing time. If this is done correctly, you free CPU time and it can use this free time to do... any other task or nothing at all, on both cases this is a win. If it's done incorrectly, games can break, and because of this many hours were put into testing this improvement so not a single game that already works regressed to have only benefits . Games affected can have very small performance gains (5%) or something absurd like being 100% faster. As all games are made differently, we dont have a list with every single game and how much they're affected (some don't even have any change), so it's up to you to check your favorite games and notice (or not) if they had some significative improvement. All this work is already part of the master builds that you can download directly from the site and there's no need to enable any specific configuration.
Work that lead to more work...
All these tests were made easier with the introduction of a new tool: a meter of the percentage being used on the emulated CPU. After all the improvements, this tool proved itself useful enough to become a new option on the emulator, displaying the emulated CPU usage at the bottom right corner of the screen, together with the draw calls per frame (dc/f) and frames per second (f/s). But the work doesn't end there... quite the opposite. Now that we have this meter visible, it's possible for the users to tell when the emulated CPU usage reach very high values and those high values aren't exactly normal, this serves us as an indicator that some instruction that should be stopped at some moment instead active (giving us a tip that the game probably should be running better if this problem was solved).
Covers and new game library
Something that existed for some time, but now it's the default, IT's BEAUTIFUL and works better than ever. Your games are now listed in a grid with their respective cover arts and to make it even easier, you can find a game typing part of the name into the search bar at the top of the window. The covers don't come out of nowhere, and because of this I've put many hours contributing with some corrections and new covers to the site/API The Games Database. If you have a game that doesn't have a cover in your list, you can request it directly to me and as soon as possible I'll add it (reminder that you can also contribute yourself if you want to, directly at the site, since the database is feed by the users).
What can I expect from the next version?
Better compatibility (that can be verified daily on the tracker)
Less missing covers at The Games Database
Better emulation accuracy
New option related to rendering performance
Reminder that you can download the latest builds directly from the official site https://purei.org/downloads.php
You can contribute directly to me via this Patreon, so I can continue to help the project with reports, tests e tracker management, the same way you can support financially the project developer at his Patreon https://www.patreon.com/jpd002. And as always, to make things clear: if you can only contribute to a single person, always choose the developer of the project above anyone else ;)