Mini progress report for the 0.50 version of Play! (PS2 emulator)

The version 0.50 was released, and with it a huge improvement of the compatibility. Even if this isn't the only improvement for this release, I thought it's important to highlight this fact, specially because the number of playable games jumped from less than 250 to 420 in less than 3 months.

What about that new option you've promissed in the last report?

You can already use it, turning it on or off in the menu "Video" at the item "Enable GS RAM reads". Basically this is a hack an in some games you'll not notice any difference with the graphics, but the performance gain in some cases is stupidly big (one example being SSX 3, where the performnance increases by only 1000%+). Tip: if you're using vulkan and noticed that the status dc/f at the right corner of the screen is displaying 1 or more, this is a sign that the game you're playing can be affected by this option (turn it on and off, check the graphics, if you had any performance gain and didn't noticed any visual issue, let the option disabled).

The games library is now even better

Now we have a filter at the top of the screen, where it's possible to type part of the name of the wanted game and the results will show up in real time at your library below. Furthermore, another big news is the addition of compatibility indicators over the game covers: playable games will have a green ball, yellow if it's only in-game, orange for intros, red for loadable and black for nothing. This way you can know what's playable just by looking directly into your games list, not being necessary to check on the compatibility tracker anymore. You can also filter your games by status, listing only the games that are playable or only the games with some specific issue label on github (extremely useful for those testing games).

Something that no one expected... but here it is

We now also have a version of the emulator that runs directly from your browser, without the need of installation. Although it's something functional, this was only an experiment made for fun, the performance in general is worse than using the regular native version of Play!, but still extremely interesting to know that this is possible ;)

The browser version can be tested here https://playjs.purei.org/ 

You can give support to the developer at this Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002
You can also give me support for the creation of this report at the apoia.se or my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/literalmente_game.

Useful links

Play!'s official site: https://purei.org/
Play!'s repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
Play!'s compatibility tracker: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-Compatibility/issues