ares, Play! and life updates

Kinda late with my latest results, but here we go...

ares

Another 4 games finished and reported to the compatibility list:

King of Fighters EX 2, The - Howling Blood (E)
King of Fighters EX 2, The - Howling Blood (Japan) (Rev 1)
Men in Black - The Series (E)
Mahou no Pumpkin - Ann to Greg no Daibouken (J)

Play!

"Only" 2 games finished, but oh boy, those were long ones:

Persona 3 FES
Persona 4

Both are playable, but there's some minor issues that still need to be addressed for a better experience. In Persona 3, windows will flicker when you spin your camera around (this is related to the lack of mipmapping support on the emulator at this point). In Persona 4, the text at the botton of the screen (on those black and yellow bars, used to show the name of the object or person you're about to interact with) isn't visible (good thing that this isn't gamebreaking at all, it's mostly used as a reference in dungeons to know exactly which floor you're at, something you don't need to know to progress in the game) and sound effects are missing from the menus. These are your avg 60+ (80 in my case...) hours JRPGs, one of the reasons I couldn't finish anything else this month.

Life

What actually kept my head busy recently, sadly, wasn't any game or emulator, but a dog I loved very much. I'll not go into details because I'm still trying to recover from the entire situation, but the long story short was that he had to have surgery, I'm a broken idiot not able to pay for it, friends helped with it (some very amazing people, you know who you are and I love you all for the support), post surgery had even worse complications and he didn't make it. He passed away sleeping in my arms a week ago and while he was recovering from the surgery I barely had time to sleep to keep an eye on him the entire night. After all this, even with the help I got, veterinary procedures were very expensive and put me in debt, so most/all of what's being paid here on patreon will be used for the next months to help with that situation.

For the people worried about this last part: I'll not change what I'm working on at all, results will be the same, I'll continue to test games the same way to contribute to the projects I support, this just means that I'll take much longer to upgrade my hardware, but your support is still very much appreciated <3

Useful links

ares site: https://ares-emu.net/

ares compatibility lists: https://ares-emu.net/compatibility

Luke Usher (project's main maintainer/leader): https://www.patreon.com/LukeUsher

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