play! progress/compatibility report + redream new cheats

Doing something slightly different this month, I've divided my attention between testing and helping find common issues for play! and as I saw many resquests recently about it, also verified and added new cheat codes to the redream database. For those that don't use or don't know how cheats work in redream: they're curated, one by one, which means that if a code is listed when you load your game the code was manually verified previously, to be sure nothing breaks under normal usage.

play!

We don't have a huge list of new playable games for this month, but for a very good reason. Most of the new implemented and improved features affected so many games that I had to put many hours into checking exactly what improved and what got regressions. So let's check some of those and list some games that I was able to verify:

clearblocks_optim:

this change was made when I was asking if anything could be done to improve the performance of a game I wanted to finish that was running at single digit framerate, Power Ranges: Super Legends. It was then found out that the game makes the emulator flush a lot of blocks, which was something that the developer optimized and bang, a sweet 300 to 400% performance improvement. As always, I check most games that shared the same issue, so the next obvious thing to do was to test every single game that had major performance issues and another nice surprise was found: Dragon Quest V was ridiculously slow at the world map (I mean, around 4 fps, it would take even minutes to reach a new town at that point). How faster it became after the changes? Fullspeed at the world's map fast baby. As we already had good performance during battles, those can easily reach above 100 fps as well (and this is with my outdated hardware, i7 2600k + GTX 1050TI, you can imagine how high this number would be with a decent PC).

So I've finally decided to finish the game and... oh well, it's a Dragon Quest game, took me dozens of hours, which is one of the reasons I wasn't able to touch much more during january.

So a short list of games that improved with this change:

Power Rangers: Super Legends: fully playable
Dragon Quest V: fully playable
Iron Man: another big performance boost but still not 100% verified
Wild Arms Alter Code F: confirmed that a bad performance case was fixed
Jak And Daxter: performance improved, needs more testing

gpu_mipmap:

This is the "big one" for the month and probably something many users expected for a long time: actual mipmapping support. For those that don't know what mipmapping is, the tldr explanation is: rendering feature that allows for better performance using pre calculated versions of the same texture being used related to how close they're to the camera (so lower resolutions of the textures are used far away from you since you can barely see them and higher resolutions are loaded once you get closer). The lack of mipmap support in play! caused many visual issues in many games, so the implementation alone made a few titles playable. We're still testing it to be sure nothing broke with the new code, but I'm happy to share some of the results:

Tomb Raider: Legend: visuals are more accurate, even the title screen looks better
Ace Combat (all games): textures far from the camera now rendering properly
Ape Escape 2: no more texture flickering far from the camera
The Incredible Hulk : Ultimate Destruction: no more texture flickering or pink textures
Tribes: Aerial Assault: correct grass and building textures
Winback: all geometry now visible (for some reason those were mostly invisible with no mipmaps)

In the next episode of Dragon Ba... no wait, wrong script...

In the next month/report: more memory card issues being fixed, more playable games, more rendering improvements being worked on as we speak and more finger pains (those games aren't going to test themselves)

redream

As I've mentioned, some people requested cheats for some games that had none (or just had cheats for a region the user didn't had for a specific game), so here's the list of what was added last month:

Dino Crisis (USA): Have All Items, Infinite Item Usage, Infinite Ammo, All Weapons, All Maps
Last Blade 2 (USA): Infinite Health P1, Infinite Health P2, Infinite Time
Nanatsu no Hikan: Infinite Health: (Kei), Infinite Health (Reina)
Rainbow Cotton: Infinite Health
Tokyo Highway Challenge 2 (PAL): Lots of Money, All Cars Unlocked, All Rivals Beaten, All Highways Unlocked

Note: most (if not all, excluding the widescreen codes I've made myself) codes are found on the internet in random sites, but sadly a ton of those aren't tested or even valid. If you have codes that are valid and you want added, just poke me here in the comments or give me a call on the official project discord https://discord.gg/zuEAVTG

Useful links:

play! site: https://purei.org/

play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-

play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

redream site: https://redream.io/

redream discord: https://discord.gg/zuEAVTG