Progress Report: November 2017

November was one of the most interesting months of the year thanks to the huge amount of games that jumped out of Nothing into the Ingame/Playable categories. This is in part thanks to the hard work announced in December 1st, which made many previously non-working big titles now start working on RPCS3. Of course, some of the progress towards this announcement was merged gradually during the month of November. In this Progress Report, major emulation improvements will be detailed, followed by a list of noteworthy, interesting, and representative games that improved from these, and lastly individual contributions will be looked at closer.

Table of Contents

Major Improvements
Games
Commits
Closing Words

First things first, the compatibility statistics. In November we saw the category of games that do absolutely Nothing go down by over 100 games, and this while not taking in account any of the games that had reported improvements in December!
We are therefore making a prediction right now: thanks to the SPU/RSX fixes, amongst several other improvements: the number of known games that do Nothing will be less than 100 before the end of the year!

That is quite the feat because when the RPCS3 project got revitalized in January, thanks to Patreon and the full time employment of Nekotekina we had less than 100 games that were Playable – that to quite a lower standard than today. And the category Nothing didn’t even exist because we argued that “What is the point? Almost every game does Nothing anyway”. How far have we come!

Game Compatibility: Game Status
Game Compatibility: Monthly Improvements (November 2017)

Looking at the GitHub statistics for November 16 authors have pushed 172 commits with roughly 11,000 added lines of code, and 5,000 deletions.

Continue reading Progress Report: November 2017

RPCS3 Begins to Emulate Several Awaited AAA Exclusives. Here’s How We’ve Done It!

Yes, you’ve read correctly. Many of the much awaited exclusives are now finally starting to be emulated by RPCS3. In this blog post, you’ll learn which games we know to have improved and how we’ve done it.
But first, check out this awesome teaser:

Table of Contents

SPU Improvements by Jarves
RSX Improvements by kd-11
List of known Improved Games
Closing Words

SPU Improvements by Jarves

There were two main changes to the SPU emulation that brought us to this point of allowing so many newer titles to progress past ‘Intro.’ Let’s take a quick look at both individually.

SPU Interrupt Fix

Many titles in RPCS3 ‘hang’, but in the case of the titles mentioned above, they do not actually crash, and the fps counter would still change with just a black screen. This normally would be mistaken for RPCS3 just being slow and the game taking a bit to load, but opening up the debugger in RPCS3 tells a different story. The games would loop over the same code on both the PPU side and SPU side. In this case, they are waiting on something, but what?

‘The Last of Us’. More like – ‘The Last Loop That Will Ever Execute’
Moving the PC to address 0 of an SPU thread explains more. Most games will have just 0 (null) written there, but some actually have a branch there.

Continue reading RPCS3 Begins to Emulate Several Awaited AAA Exclusives. Here’s How We’ve Done It!