Play! february compatibility report (PS2 emulation)
Yet another major compatibility bump. This month I've decided to start with some games that I've mostly ignored due to being too long to test (RPGs being RPGs), and some others that I just didn't had the opportunity to check last month. So for some details before we list our monthly wins: both 187 - Ride or Die and Iron Man were promoted to playables due to performance improvements since the last time I've checked them. Hanakisou simply didn't worked previosly (hanging at some intro animation), and went directly into the playable category with latest improvements. Dot Hack Part 1 and 2 were some of the RPGs I just didn't wanted to touch since they would eat many hours and... they did ate nearly 2 weeks (I'm already checking Part 3 and it's expected as a new playable next month, not sure about 4 and the G.U. series, at least for now). Fatal Frame was sitting in my TODO list for the longest time and I had a blast with the game working exactly as it should with a single visual issue (a single vertex rendering incorrectly in a room near the end of the game, at the corner of the screen). Sadly both Fatal Frame 2 and 3 were verified and can't be played properly due to (at least from what I've verified so far) SPU emulation issues, causing both sound/music to loop incorrectly and the games to hang at some specific loading screens.
Resident Evil was... well, let's just say I don't want to touch a game from this series for at least a month. After finishing the game I've noticed the PAL region wasn't verified and I've wanted to confirm if there was no specific issues with that release of the game... so let's play it again. Ok... now there's also the japanese version of the game so who needs a life, let's finish that one as well for the sake of completeness.
I've also asked the developer to check on Hunter x Hunter as it was hanging in a black screen with some interesting stuff on the logs while doing so. You can peak at the changes that fixed the game here. While making the game work and reach in-game, a new issue was found with it: vertical vertex explosions. With that issue fixed by clamping some FPU values, we got a combo improvement as Bloody Roard 4 famous geometry explosions were also 100% fixed, giving us another fully playable game.
Heroes of Might and Magic was something that went in-game with improvements for 3DO Company games merged 2 months ago, just now I had the time to finish it.
New verified playable games:
187 - Ride or Die
Iron Man
Hanakisou
Dot Hack Part 1 - Infection
Dot Hack Part 2 - Mutation
Fatal Frame
Piposaru 2001
Resident Evil 4 (U)
Resident Evil 4 (E)
Ocean Commander
Biohazard 4
Hunter x Hunter: Ryuumyaku no Saidan
Ape Escape 2
Bloody Roar 4
Heroes of Might and Magic - Quest for the Dragon Bone Staff
As usual, this is what I had the time to test but there's still a huuuge list of games that just weren't verified yet. We also got very close to my personal goal for the project to have the number of playable games being higher than any other status (with some effort and luck we'll be there by the end of next month), but sadly it was a "so close, but yet so far" case.
Anyway, see you all next month and thanks for all the support <3
Useful links:
play! site: https://purei.org/
play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play-
play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002