This month the amount of games that became playable are slightly less exciting than what I've (finally) learned to do. The tldr: I can improve the performance of many games by myself without the need to ask the actual developer when a game have unusual usage of the EE (the PS2 CPU). More details and what you should expect from my work down on this article, for now the usual new playable stuff: New verified playable games [04/2025]: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2 Under the Moon - Crescent Zoids: Struggle Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: similar to the first game on the series, this just needed some (many...) hours to complete a 100% test. It performs almost the same as the first game, but it's running slightly better. Under the Moon - Crescent: this was already on my list since December of the last year, finally fully verified with no issues. Zoids: Struggle: last console version of the series left untested, now fully verified. Performance isn't as good as it should be, but there's no gamebreaking issues. INCOMING: a lot of idle skip patches! The most important thing this month is the fact that I've learned (thanks to the actual developer of play!) to create my own idle skip patches. Many games waste a ton of time/cycles doing instructions that do... nothing. Yeap, exactly: blocks of nothing wasting our precious emulated CPU time and the consequence is that performance goes bad for no actual good reason. While there is a code in play! that does this idling detection on it's own, it's sadly not able to get all of them, so many games are running much slower than they should. Some time ago the developer added the lovely idle patches support so if you can find the precise address on the emulated PS2 memory which holds the instructions idling, there's usually a nice performance boost. And that's what I've been doing for this past week: hunting down every single game that has unusual high EE usage and poking at all possible memory address looking for performance improvements. In some games there's more than just that as the main bottleneck: Zoids Struggle is a good example, where even with the EE usage "fixed", we only got 2 to 4 more fps, which means the main issue is probably VU related instead. BUT, in games like Obscure or Obscure 2... pretty much a +100% improvement! So I'm finally able to contribute a bit more than just testing results... but this will require even more time testing since I need to double check even games that were verified as playables to be sure I didn't broke the game itself with my black magic patches. That's all for now, excited to share my results on the next report, see you all and thx for the support <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002 Tags

Hello people! As I've mentioned on the latest report, I had to finish my Shin Megami Tensei saga, and this month we already have another step towards that: Devil Summoner fully verified. Sadly I didn't had enough time, but I'm almost half-way into Devil Summoner 2 as well. The other game I had in my backlog also got promoted to playable, so let's simply list them below as usual. New verified playable games [03/2025]: Way of the Samurai 2 Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner Way of the Samurai 2: simply a matter of testing the entire game as it already was working nicely from the first time I've re-checked in a long time. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: honestly I've never checked on this game with play! before, so it was a nice surprise to confirm that it's indeed fully playable. Only detail is related to performance, since the game looks VU bottlenecked, then some scenes will run slower than they should (combat in general shouldn't be an issue). The second game will probably be fully verified by the end of this month, but I would like to take a second to talk about something else related to my previous article (The Hungry Ghosts english translation patch). As some people know, there's a team doing a translation for this game for some time and they have a discord where they share their updates, but no date or anything else other than a broad estimative of how much was already translated, which is fairly normal for projects like this. So no public release of any kind, even for testing, then people waiting on it can't really do much other than crossing their fingers and hope for the best. This is when someone else came in the discord and shared some info related to how he got a copy of the game and would love to play it but he also couldn't read japanese... but he could do something else. With some tools made, a quick translation using the Google Translation API was created. Obviously, the results are far from perfect, but more than enough for the average player to be able to at least play the game (till be very end I may add, since I've finished the game 3 times before confirming that the translation didn't broke it). This was shared around (I've made a patch file based on the translated game, to make it easier to share and apply to your original japanese copy of the game ISO file), and for some reason got a bunch of hate towards the guy that made the translation. Honestly, I can understand the point of view that some hold against this type of approach, but it's something done for free and not trying to offend or hurt anyone, just a player that wanted to play the game and made some efforth to make it playable for others as well. If you find any post/article/page mentioning this patch, please be mindful that someone just wanted to make the game more approachable (at least until the manually made translation is finished), and that someone probably gave up entirely on making any other translations because of the negative feedback. TLDR: please be nice to people that simply are trying to help you ;) With that said, thx for your support and attention, see you all next month ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

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  

This month we got some more games playable, but the number could be slightly bigger if it wasn't for my choice of (yet again) very long JRPGs. A combo of those this time, since I couldn't let the second part of such great game left on the corner with the first part being fully verified (nothing to do with me being curious af about the ending of the saga, no sir...). New verified playable games [01/2025]: Way of the Samurai Colin McRae Rally 2005 Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 1 Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 2 Way of the Samurai: this guy was in a "playable state" for some time, so I've decided to finally put it to rest with a full test. Note: I've also started testing the second game and I'm almost done with it as well, so expect a confirmation on it being fully playable soon™. Colin McRae Rally 2005: as I've started with some races, it was obvious that performance would make my life a living hell at that initial state, so I've poked the developer about the high EE usage and the magic idle skip patch was made that improved the general performance around 65%, more than enough for me to complete the game. Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2: both games only took so long for me to finish because not only they're long, but also because I've wanted to do every optional thing possible (that hurt my soul, specially with the optional bosses on the second game...). They're fully playable but there's an issue with z-fighting that makes some textures "flicker" at some points of the game (lights at the ceiling of the initial dungeon, some shadows in some random areas and some minor stuff on the walls in some areas as well). Both are fully playble + the choices you've made on the first game carry over to the second game as they should. Since I'm deep into Shin Megami Tensei hype, I'll probably pick on some of the other spin off games next, so that's what you can expect for the next month, but you can always suggest a specific game to be verified as well, I'm not against playing something else that's not on my list. With that said, thx for the continuous support and see you all next month ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

Checking on my list of "okay, I'll get back to this game at some point [MONTHS GO BY...] ... I forgot so now I'll need to start over since I don't even remember how to play" titles, Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land ate most of my time. To be honest: it was a fine "waste of time", the game is addictive once you get past the 1HK ninjas (they will come back at some point, specially after the end of the game). So I went back again to some other RPGs just to remove them from my list, which now confirmed the entire .Hack series as fully playable (all the games, all regions of each game). Let's poke at he playables list: New verified playable games [01/2025]: Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady Taito Legends Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked .hack//fragment .hack//Infection Wizardry - Tales of the Forsaken Land: many hours of testing (including the painful post game giant dungeon), game is now confirmed as fully playable with good performance. Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady: tested for the first time, the game wasn't able to reach the main menu. The issue was fixed by adding a delay for a specific part of the memory card emulation code ( https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/commit/43d8cde41fbabd1e59c8eda2bf2e2a4b7a28c7d9). With that fix the entire game became fully playable. Taito Legends: finally had some time to check on the rest of the games in this compilation, so here we go with a +1. Note: performance is already good but can be further improved in the future by adding an idle skip patch. Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked: I already has a save with some levels done, so I just went and... deleted the save to play it from start . I know this sounds weird, but it's very important to not use old save games if the latest time you've played the game was with a much older version of the emulator since you could skip new issues that you would never know about unless you retest the entire game. It's painful if a game is very long (like with your avg RPG), but very needed to be sure we don't let some annoying regression show up. Game finished for good, and playable with good performance. .hack//Fragment and .hack//Infection: I've been slowly finishing those two for the past few weeks, and now I'm finally done. All the rendering issues we had while starting the tests with the series are gone, so the entire series is now confirmed as playable. I've just started my tests with the game Sled Storm as well. The first impression was that performance could be improved... a lot. Good news is that the developer already made an idle skip patch that fixed that and I couldn't find anything else wrong with the game (up the point I've reached so far), so expect for it to be fully playable this month as well. There's a ton of other titles added to my TODO list, so I hope for a similar or better list of playables in the next report ;) As always: thx for your support and see you all next month <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

Sup people, today I have an early article for something different than the usual report: the release of the Hungry Ghosts PS2 game english translation patch. Some people may know about the game and most probably ignore it since it's a text heavy game that's barely navigable without being able read japanese. I got interested in the game after some minutes playing it in it's original language, but it was hard to enjoy it not being able to understand my decisions (which are many and will affect the ending you get), so I've dropped it and searched for any kind of translation being worked on. I was glad to find a project with some nice people working hard on making the most accurate translation possible (they can be reached at this discord https://discord.gg/KqaZFayNjC ), but as you know these things take a looong time to finish and be released, and I needed my spooky fix. This is where Cash/wtfyd came along with his approach: using Google Translation API and some image editing, he was done translating the game in record time. Even if it's a rough translation, the game itself didn't showed any serious issues and I was able to finish it with multiple routes. After all the tests, I was able to make a patch that you can apply to an unmodified copy of the game and enjoy it yourself, so let's get to the steps: Download the patch from here: https://mega.nz/file/YR8EBA4B#9swYumiAAkdwgfOnUN3gq0C5XjAkfTgRlOG7tZzdpZ8 [Alternative patch, smaller file but same steps to use]: https://mega.nz/file/1MUWSZbQ#5i-i3Kd_UrlNrSuWiDyuPEJgtiNnlvo0Qf7goacVv8Y Download the Delta Patcher from here: https://github.com/marco-calautti/DeltaPatcher/releases Extract the patch to any folder (same folder as the original game is easier) Run Delta Patcher, select the original game file (.ISO) and the extracted .xdelta patch Click "Apply Patch" and wait for the message to confirm the process is done Load the patched game into your PS2 emulator and have fun ;) Just a small bonus disclaimer: I didn't made anything related to this translation, my work here was just testing the entire game to make sure it works properly, the translation itself was made entirely by Cash/wtfyd and I've only tested and made the patch, so give credit to the actual translator if you use the content in any video or article.

Hello people! As I've mentioned on the latest report, I had to finish my Shin Megami Tensei saga, and this month we already have another step towards that: Devil Summoner fully verified. Sadly I didn't had enough time, but I'm almost half-way into Devil Summoner 2 as well. The other game I had in my backlog also got promoted to playable, so let's simply list them below as usual. New verified playable games [03/2025]: Way of the Samurai 2 Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner Way of the Samurai 2: simply a matter of testing the entire game as it already was working nicely from the first time I've re-checked in a long time. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: honestly I've never checked on this game with play! before, so it was a nice surprise to confirm that it's indeed fully playable. Only detail is related to performance, since the game looks VU bottlenecked, then some scenes will run slower than they should (combat in general shouldn't be an issue). The second game will probably be fully verified by the end of this month, but I would like to take a second to talk about something else related to my previous article (The Hungry Ghosts english translation patch). As some people know, there's a team doing a translation for this game for some time and they have a discord where they share their updates, but no date or anything else other than a broad estimative of how much was already translated, which is fairly normal for projects like this. So no public release of any kind, even for testing, then people waiting on it can't really do much other than crossing their fingers and hope for the best. This is when someone else came in the discord and shared some info related to how he got a copy of the game and would love to play it but he also couldn't read japanese... but he could do something else. With some tools made, a quick translation using the Google Translation API was created. Obviously, the results are far from perfect, but more than enough for the average player to be able to at least play the game (till be very end I may add, since I've finished the game 3 times before confirming that the translation didn't broke it). This was shared around (I've made a patch file based on the translated game, to make it easier to share and apply to your original japanese copy of the game ISO file), and for some reason got a bunch of hate towards the guy that made the translation. Honestly, I can understand the point of view that some hold against this type of approach, but it's something done for free and not trying to offend or hurt anyone, just a player that wanted to play the game and made some efforth to make it playable for others as well. If you find any post/article/page mentioning this patch, please be mindful that someone just wanted to make the game more approachable (at least until the manually made translation is finished), and that someone probably gave up entirely on making any other translations because of the negative feedback. TLDR: please be nice to people that simply are trying to help you ;) With that said, thx for your support and attention, see you all next month ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

Final report of the year, here we go! On the bad side of things (yes, let's start with that =x), we didn't reached the %'s I've planned for this past year compatibility wise, but we got "close enough". On the good side: december had more playable games confirmed/fixed than the past 3 months combined! With new 11 playables and some improvements that were already confirmed for improving other games I'm still testing, we're starting 2026 the best way possible, so let's check on each game: New verified playable games [12/2025]: Burnout Hungry Ghosts Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3 FES The Hobbit: The Prelude to the Lord of the Rings Final Fantasy X-2 Fushigi no Umi no Nadia: Dennou Battle: Miss Nautilus Contest Fushigi no Umi no Nadia: Inherit the Blue Water Mahou Sensei Negima! 1-jikanme: Okochama Sensei wa Mahoutsukai! Canvas 2: Nijiiro no Sketch Suki na Mono wa Suki dakara Shou ga Nai!! First Limit & Target Nights: Sukishou! Episode #01+#02 (Disc 1) (First Limit: Sukishou! Episode #01) Suki na Mono wa Suki dakara Shou ga Nai!! First Limit & Target Nights: Sukishou! Episode #01+#02 (Disc 2) (Target Nights: Sukishou! Episode #02) Burnout: this game has been in-game for a looong time, but now an idle skip patch was made and this improved the performance enough for me to be able to fully test it. The patch got us a nice 23% peformance boost. Hungry Ghosts: I had previously checked on this game at least 2 years ago but never got that far since it's heavy on the dialogue side and there was no english translation. This changed recently with the "release" of a new translation. I put "release" like this since it was not actually released yet, I've used a patch that was given to me for the sake of testing but the developer still didn't made a public release himself. This specific patch isn't exactly accurate but it's good enough if you just want to experience the game and play it till the end (no crashes or any kind of issue found with it so far and I've checked multiple end game routes). There's a second translation patch being worked that's more accurate, but that isn't released even for testing so far, so if anyone is interested (and the dev give me permission) in the one I've used, I can make a delta patch file that you can apply to your own game and check the game yourself (I legit recommend this one, it's fun... and weird). Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3 FES: I've been playing this specific version of the game on the background of other games for some time, and now I've finally finished, +1 for us. The Hobbit: The Prelude to the Lord of the Rings: performance issue and stuttering gone with the idle patch added, verified as fully playable. Final Fantasy X-2: not much to say with this one, I just never had the time to even touch it until december and... it was fully playable this entire time. Fushigi no Umi no Nadia (both games): those were tested for the first time this month, and while they're working fine the performance was bad . With brand new idle patches added for each, now they can easily run above 120 fps even with my terrible CPU. Mahou Sensei Negima! 1-jikanme + Canvas 2: both had stuttering issues that were fixed at some "random" point (not sure exactly which change in the code fixed this because I've left those games untouched for at least 4 months...), now running as good as it gets. Suki na Mono wa Suki dakara Shou ga Nai!! (both games): another combo of games that had idle patches added to reach good performance. Both can be finished with no issues. Other than those playables, we had a bunch of improvements/fixes that made some games reach the "potentially playable" middle ground. Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey now reaches in-game (it was hanging at the main menu with almost nothing visible), Jak-X (PAL version) reached in-game and some others had issues with hanging at the main menus that were also fixed and will require further testing. I've also started my tests with Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land , which had only one issue while starting at the end of the first battle and now runs properly enough for me to get my ass kicked (and slashed, and poisoned... and possessed?!), so if nothing else goes wrong that will be a +1 soon as well. Bye 2025, hi Mr. 2026, please be a better year for me and everyone else that supports my game testing efforts! Let's keep the improvements coming and see you all in the next report, thx for all the support given this entire year <3 <3 <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

This month the amount of games that became playable are slightly less exciting than what I've (finally) learned to do. The tldr: I can improve the performance of many games by myself without the need to ask the actual developer when a game have unusual usage of the EE (the PS2 CPU). More details and what you should expect from my work down on this article, for now the usual new playable stuff: New verified playable games [04/2025]: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2 Under the Moon - Crescent Zoids: Struggle Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: similar to the first game on the series, this just needed some (many...) hours to complete a 100% test. It performs almost the same as the first game, but it's running slightly better. Under the Moon - Crescent: this was already on my list since December of the last year, finally fully verified with no issues. Zoids: Struggle: last console version of the series left untested, now fully verified. Performance isn't as good as it should be, but there's no gamebreaking issues. INCOMING: a lot of idle skip patches! The most important thing this month is the fact that I've learned (thanks to the actual developer of play!) to create my own idle skip patches. Many games waste a ton of time/cycles doing instructions that do... nothing. Yeap, exactly: blocks of nothing wasting our precious emulated CPU time and the consequence is that performance goes bad for no actual good reason. While there is a code in play! that does this idling detection on it's own, it's sadly not able to get all of them, so many games are running much slower than they should. Some time ago the developer added the lovely idle patches support so if you can find the precise address on the emulated PS2 memory which holds the instructions idling, there's usually a nice performance boost. And that's what I've been doing for this past week: hunting down every single game that has unusual high EE usage and poking at all possible memory address looking for performance improvements. In some games there's more than just that as the main bottleneck: Zoids Struggle is a good example, where even with the EE usage "fixed", we only got 2 to 4 more fps, which means the main issue is probably VU related instead. BUT, in games like Obscure or Obscure 2... pretty much a +100% improvement! So I'm finally able to contribute a bit more than just testing results... but this will require even more time testing since I need to double check even games that were verified as playables to be sure I didn't broke the game itself with my black magic patches. That's all for now, excited to share my results on the next report, see you all and thx for the support <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002 Tags

Checking on my list of "okay, I'll get back to this game at some point [MONTHS GO BY...] ... I forgot so now I'll need to start over since I don't even remember how to play" titles, Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land ate most of my time. To be honest: it was a fine "waste of time", the game is addictive once you get past the 1HK ninjas (they will come back at some point, specially after the end of the game). So I went back again to some other RPGs just to remove them from my list, which now confirmed the entire .Hack series as fully playable (all the games, all regions of each game). Let's poke at he playables list: New verified playable games [01/2025]: Wizardry - Tales of The Forsaken Land Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady Taito Legends Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked .hack//fragment .hack//Infection Wizardry - Tales of the Forsaken Land: many hours of testing (including the painful post game giant dungeon), game is now confirmed as fully playable with good performance. Princess Lover! - Eternal Love for My Lady: tested for the first time, the game wasn't able to reach the main menu. The issue was fixed by adding a delay for a specific part of the memory card emulation code ( https://github.com/jpd002/Play-/commit/43d8cde41fbabd1e59c8eda2bf2e2a4b7a28c7d9). With that fix the entire game became fully playable. Taito Legends: finally had some time to check on the rest of the games in this compilation, so here we go with a +1. Note: performance is already good but can be further improved in the future by adding an idle skip patch. Samurai Champloo - Sidetracked: I already has a save with some levels done, so I just went and... deleted the save to play it from start . I know this sounds weird, but it's very important to not use old save games if the latest time you've played the game was with a much older version of the emulator since you could skip new issues that you would never know about unless you retest the entire game. It's painful if a game is very long (like with your avg RPG), but very needed to be sure we don't let some annoying regression show up. Game finished for good, and playable with good performance. .hack//Fragment and .hack//Infection: I've been slowly finishing those two for the past few weeks, and now I'm finally done. All the rendering issues we had while starting the tests with the series are gone, so the entire series is now confirmed as playable. I've just started my tests with the game Sled Storm as well. The first impression was that performance could be improved... a lot. Good news is that the developer already made an idle skip patch that fixed that and I couldn't find anything else wrong with the game (up the point I've reached so far), so expect for it to be fully playable this month as well. There's a ton of other titles added to my TODO list, so I hope for a similar or better list of playables in the next report ;) As always: thx for your support and see you all next month <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

This month we got some more games playable, but the number could be slightly bigger if it wasn't for my choice of (yet again) very long JRPGs. A combo of those this time, since I couldn't let the second part of such great game left on the corner with the first part being fully verified (nothing to do with me being curious af about the ending of the saga, no sir...). New verified playable games [01/2025]: Way of the Samurai Colin McRae Rally 2005 Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 1 Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 2 Way of the Samurai: this guy was in a "playable state" for some time, so I've decided to finally put it to rest with a full test. Note: I've also started testing the second game and I'm almost done with it as well, so expect a confirmation on it being fully playable soon™. Colin McRae Rally 2005: as I've started with some races, it was obvious that performance would make my life a living hell at that initial state, so I've poked the developer about the high EE usage and the magic idle skip patch was made that improved the general performance around 65%, more than enough for me to complete the game. Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2: both games only took so long for me to finish because not only they're long, but also because I've wanted to do every optional thing possible (that hurt my soul, specially with the optional bosses on the second game...). They're fully playable but there's an issue with z-fighting that makes some textures "flicker" at some points of the game (lights at the ceiling of the initial dungeon, some shadows in some random areas and some minor stuff on the walls in some areas as well). Both are fully playble + the choices you've made on the first game carry over to the second game as they should. Since I'm deep into Shin Megami Tensei hype, I'll probably pick on some of the other spin off games next, so that's what you can expect for the next month, but you can always suggest a specific game to be verified as well, I'm not against playing something else that's not on my list. With that said, thx for the continuous support and see you all next month ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

We're almost at the end of our Shadow Hearts journey: Shadow Hearts 1 became playable, Shadow Hearts: Covenant got it's time and now only Shadow Hearts: From the New World is left. As usual, the games from this series suffer from being too sensitive to seek timings while trying to read information from the disc, so time and time again I had my adventure cut short with a hang (and a horrible taste in my mouth when I remembered the last time I had saved...). Let's see what improved first, then we'll go into more details. New verified playable games [06/2025]: Shadow Hearts Shadow Hearts: Covenant Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 2 Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 3 Shadow Hearts: two issues were found and fixed: performance and lottery mini-game hanging. For the performance, we had a new idle patch added (there's still some work to be done to have the game running even better, but it's rendering related and will not be addressed at this time). The lottery mini-game isn't exactly mandatory to finish the game, but it's very useful to obtain some neat and unique items. At the end of the mini-game, play! would hang there forever, which is an issue also present if you try to play the game with some models of the PS3 console (earlier models had more of the original PS2 hardware included to be able to play PS2 games, later models removed the parts and went with software emulation instead, which introduced the issue). With this fixed, the game can now be fully enjoyed. Shadow Hearts: Covenant: performance wasn't an issue with this game, but the timings came once again to bite us in the ass with "random" hangings here and there. A new change to the timings made the entire game playable, which lead us to our mention of... Shadow Hearts: From the New World: I know, I know, I didn't listed the game above, so why it's mentioned here? Well, the game shares the same issues with sensitive timings, so it was the obvious choice for my next game to test. So far the timings were changed 3 times, with each change I've experienced less and less frequent issues (cross your finger for this being the last one, because I'm really far into the game already). So we can bet on this bad boy being playable for the next report. Ultraman: Fighting Evolution 2 and 3: while the issue on those games weren't gamebreaking, they were for sure annoying to see (water and ground textures were all messed up). With this issue fixed (and blame me, since I have no clue which exact change improved the rendering of the games). All looking good and finally fully enjoyable. I'll continue with my Shadow Hearts saga, hoping for the best for the next month, but there's something else I want to mention which isn't exactly emulation related: muh products. For some time now I've been making laser engraved art on wood, just recently started engraving games/fantasy (e.g. Middle-Earth and Skyrim) maps on fake leather as well for sale. These are things I enjoy doing a lot and I had the idea to share both the results and showcase them for sale here as well (daddy needs a new PC badly ). Prices are something I can for sure say are low compared to similar stuff I saw online for sale, but my main concern is shipping (I'm from Brazil, so for anyone not from my country the shipping could be, well, not a very good deal). In some days I'll make a new article with more details about it, but feel free to share your opinion or if you're interested this kind of stuff. Thanks again for all the support so far and see you all... in a couple of days ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

This last month I've lost some data due to upgrading to a newer OS (yes, I was still using Windows 7 for almost the entire time doing the tests, sue me). For some weird reason, even simple notepad text files got corrupted while being loaded into Windows 11, but I was lucky enough to be able to recover some of it during the transition. What I had planned previously still worked with verifying most games that I had already tested in the past, so not a lot of time was lost at least. All results from checking/re-checking games [11/2025]: Girl Zone: previously untested, verified as fully playable Shifters : previously hanging at the press start screen, now reaches in-game Furry Tales: previously hanging after the first intro screen, now reaches in-game Frogger: The Great Quest: previously hanging at the first intro screen, now reaches in-game B-Boy: previously hanging at the first intro screen, now reaches in-game Hot Shots Golf Fore!: previously hanging before the main menu, now reaches in-game The Getaway: previously hanging while trying to start a new game, now reaches in-game Scaler: previously hanging before the main menu, now reaches in-game Heatseeker: previously hanging at the intro screens, now reaches in-game Intros and loadables numbers got slightly better, but only a few of those that got promoted to in-game are potentially playable (due to either rendering or performance issues), mainly Frogger and Scaler. Last month of the year I'll focus mostly on games that were never tested, so we can get a better feel for how much % of the actual PS2 library is already playable/broken with the emulator at this point, then I'll make lists of common issues to make sure any change made covers the highest amount of games, so wish me luck and see you all next month /o/ PS: since I had that issue with my older Google account I wasn't able to update the arcade compatibility site, so I'll try to move a copy of the older files to a new host and update that asap Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

You're all probably tired of reading "hey, I've played [insert game name here] for [insert ungodly amount of hours here], but that was the case again! The game this time was Tales of the Abyss. Taking advantage of the recently added patch to improve it's performance, I did everything possible in the game (yes, even all those mostly boring side quests), and finally promoted it to playable. This specific game is an RPG but with real time battles, which made this many hours of usage of the analog sitck on my DS4 controller finally cause the cursed drift (not a lot, but it made much harder to even walk properly without doing some extra efforth to stay on the correct path sometimes). With this and some other games finished, we've reached 47.58% total of playable games (including all the games reported so far + some new entries), from a grand total of 2608 games. New verified playable games [06/2025]: Phantom Brave Nickelodeon Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom Nickelodeon SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab Oretachi Geesen Zoku: Quarth Osouji Sentai Clean Keeper H Tales of the Abyss Phantom Brave: visual issues fixed (some of the geometry was invisible in older versions of the emulator), so I just had to grind my way (not that much...) till the end. Nickelodeon Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom: previosly unable to save, but now the entire game works properly. Nickelodeon SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab: also previously unable to save, slow and with many visual issues... and all of that fixed! Oretachi Geesen Zoku: Quarth and Osouji Sentai Clean Keeper H: both previously checked as in-game but never reported because [LAZY], but now both were finally fully verified and promoted to playables. Tales of the Abyss: performance issues fixed and the entire game was verified this month, +1 to us. With all those games finished, I've decided to check on Shadow Hearts next: the game works fine and... oh, it runs almost twice as fast with OpenGL instead of Vulkan?! Yeap, this game uses pre rendered (static images, most of the time) for the backgrounds, while having characters and some other minor details on the scenes as real time 3D, so what's going on? First thing that caught my attention was the EE (PS2 CPU) usage: 99 to 100% all the time. This is very weird since there's not a lot going on to cause this, so I've asked the developer to check and he found a specific memory address to create an idle patch. Even with this patch (which actually improved performance), the difference between both APIs performance was still too huge to ignore (we're talking about 100% difference in most scenes). While checking on OpenGL, I've found that most scenes on the game are trying to do 1800+ draw calls per frame and yes, this is with static backgrounds. The developer looked into it a bit further and looks like the game is trying to load the same assets to memory over and over again, hundreds of times per frame per object, so that's a behaviour that he'll have to address later to make vulkan run at least at the same performance as OpenGL. This is important not only for the sake of performance, but also because vulkan is the only API at the moment that renders this game transparency/blending effects to prevent issues like characters being rendered behind the scenario and incorrect battle transition effects. Bonus issue: the lottery mini game was also broken, but this a known issue that even happens on some models of PS3 due to later models not having an actual PS2 EE hardware included. At least this issue was also fixed with another patch, so only the rendering performance issue is left to have the game fully playable at fullspeed on most hardwares. Oh, almost forgot: I'm already at 50% of the game at this point, so as soon as the fix is available, I'm sure this will be another +1 for us as well! I would like to thank everyone for their support, you can't imagine how much this matters to me, see you all next month <3 Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002

As I do often, this month was mostly based on going back to games I had previously tested that were in bad states (broken/loadables/intros), to double check for any improvement. It's always nice to see games being fixed by "random" improvements in unrelated games, and we had at least one that reached the playable state this month. New verified playable games [10/2025]: Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Channel Edition Monster Hunter Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Channel Edition: previously the game hanged right after selecting a stage, after selecting your character. Now you can get in-game and finish the entire thing, but it's worth a note that performance depends on both hardware and in-game options. With a fast enough CPU, default settings should run the game at fullspeed. If you're using an older/slower CPU, you may need to disable the pre rendered videos backgrounds to improve it. If even with that the game doesn't run at fullspeed, last resort would be to disable 3D character models as well. Monster Hunter : this is a game I've been testing since January (because I suck at it and because I didn't wanted to break my controller...), and finally I had some time to finish the last missions. Performance should be good regardless of settings. This was all I was able to test, but I got some extra results from retesting other games as well, just couldn't make the time to confirm they're playable as well (some more stuff went from intros to in-game, but I hold on the results from those until I can either confirm they're fully playable... or if there's a gamebreaking issue that needs to be fixed before reporting anything) Next month I'm sure we'll have at least one more playable game the tests and after finishing that I'll resume poking at games that were never touched previously (feel free to drop a game suggestion that isn't listed here https://github.com/jpd002/Play-Compatibility/issues yet, I'll 100% take that into consideration since my pick will most likely be something random. That's it for today, thx for your support and see you all next month ;) Useful Links play! site: https://purei.org/ play! NAMCO System 246/256 compatibility list: List play! repository: https://github.com/jpd002/Play- play! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jpd002