A very PS2 December (play! PS2 emulator progress/compatibility report)
Hi everyone and hi end of this year! As I didn't had much time to work on anything else, I've decided yet again to focus into a single project and to go nuclear on it as well. The results: some of the most impressive compatibility boosts we had this year.
As a side note to that, I could put some extra time in a specific game that I wanted to see playable as well, and after almost 80 hours of testing I guess it's interesting enough to cover some details about it as well.
A bug to rule them all...
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age was the game of choice. After some hours of kicking orcs asses right and left the performance started to go... not that great. First areas of the game aren't that complex geometry wise, with only a single area being extreme and only at some specific camera angle (behind a tower near the forest, where you can find some "hidden" chests). At this specific point the game would not render the character model, but only if you're looking at some angle, so it wasn't gamebreaking enough to make me give up yet. As performance was still an issue, I've asked the developer to poke at some possible improvement and the next day we got it: a nice 14% performance boost. With that in hands and no other area making my character invisible I went all the way till I've reached the final area of the game: the Pelennor Fields. This area isn't only epic in the movies, it destroyed both performance and the limits of the emulator for rendering to the point I couldn't see my HUD, chracter model or even half of the scenario grounds. Issue reported and for a quick fix (aka hack it for now, fix it later), the developer increased the allocated memory to 512 MB. "Fix" in hands, save loaded and ok, now everything is rendering properly... for one entire hour. After that I've found yet another part of the end game where most of the scenario and characters weren't visible again, so not even allocating this stupidly high amount of memory was able to make the game render without issues. Lucky me this was 2 battles away from the final boss and everything else worked as it should.
The TLDR: while you can finish the entire game once those changes are merged, I couldn't just label it as playable yet (at least until rendering is fixed and performance gets a boost of another 50%).
play!
New verified playable games:
Beat Down - Fists of Vengeance
AirForce Delta Strike
Moujuutsukai to Oujisama - Snow Bride
Champions: Return to Arms (PAL)
Johnny Bravo in the Hukka-Mega-Mighty-Ultra-Extreme Date-O-Rama!
Hoshi-iro no Okurimono
Iron Chef
Power Rangers: Dino Thunder
Castle Fantasia: Erencia Senki: Plus Stories
Ore no Shita de Agake
Panic Palette
Monster Eggs
Son of the Lion King
Bara no Ki ni Bara no Hanasaku: Das Versprechen
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Slotter Up Core 7: Gekitouda! Street Fighter II
Slotter Up Core 2: Gouda! Minami no Teiou
Slotter Up Core 4: Ton-chan Gekida! Jissen Pachi-Slot Ore-izm!!
Slotter Up Core 5: Lupin Daisuki! Shuyaku wa Zenigata
Simple 2000 Series Vol. 73: The Saiyuu Touenden
Slotter Up Core 6: Bakuenda! Kyojin no Hoshi II
Slotter Up Core 9: Jug Kiwametari! Final Juggler
Slotter Up Core 8: Gokuenda! Kyojin no Hoshi III
Slotter Up Core 10: Mach GoGoGo 2
Slotter Up Core 11: Kyojin no Hoshi IV: Seishun Gunzou-hen
Slotter Up Core 12: Ping Pong
Slotter Up Core Alpha: Shuku Tora! Yuushou Panel! Shinka! Kyojin no Hoshi
Slotter Up Mania: Chou Oki-Slot! Pioneer Special
Slotter Up Mania 2: Kokuchi no Kyoku! Juggler Special
Slotter Up Mania 3: Densetsu Fukkatsu! New Pegasus Special
Slotter Up Mania 4: Nangoku no Kou! Super Hana Hana & Shiomahal & Oase
Slotter Up Mania 5: Soukai Gekida! Mach GoGoGo & Daruma Neko
Slotter Up Mania 6: Oki no Neppuu! Pioneer Special II
Slotter Up Mania 7: Saishin Saikyou! Pioneer MAX
Slotter Up Mania 8: Senkou Kokuchi! Juggler Special II
Slotter Up Mania 9: Atsu Oki da ze! Mensoore-30 & Mensoore 2-30
Slotter Up Mania 10: Pioneer Special III
Slotter Up Mania 11: 2027 vs. 2027 II
Useful links:
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age improvements: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/tree/vu0_callms_improvs