PS5PCEM 0.3.2

PS5PCEM 0.3.2

Changes since 0.3.1-beta.1: more confirmed playable titles, Quake II rendering
fixes, working movie audio and later 3D scenes in Ghost of Yōtei, a corrected and
faster Tetris interface, parallel shader compilation and command preparation,
and a native package extractor included with the launcher.

PS5PCEM remains an experimental emulator. Compatibility claims below distinguish
maintainer-confirmed playthroughs from menus, captured scenes, and measured
performance on the development machine.

Game compatibility

• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita's Rewind is now playable and
  completable, confirmed by the maintainer on September 24, 2026. The latest
  capture shows the Red Ranger in the Command Center training stage with the
  HUD, objectives, and controller prompts. The existing narrowly matched CRT
  scaling fallback remains necessary on the development host.
• Quake II reaches gameplay and is recorded as playable and completable
  following the maintainer's September 16 confirmation. Fixes cover startup
  imports and directory listings, deferred G-buffer writes, depth comparison
  samplers, and typed buffer reads used by model vertices and lighting data.
  Missing NPC geometry has been restored; lighting issues in some scenes remain
  under investigation.
• Big Helmet Heroes advances from its intro to a correctly rendered main
  menu, including character models, textures, lighting, and colors. Fixes cover
  Gen5 single-sample texture addressing, layered render targets, and scanout
  channel order. Two clean menu runs measured about 3.2–3.3 FPS on an
  RTX 3070 Ti. Gameplay has not been verified.
• Tetris Effect: Connected now renders its license and menu pages without
  the duplicated UI and vertical boundary seen in earlier builds. Publishing
  metadata clears correctly and retaining the title's render targets reduces
  repeated readbacks. License frames improved from 235 ms to 159 ms
  (about 4.3 to 6.3 FPS); sampled Journey frames improved from
  1127–1276 ms to 318–396 ms. These are development measurements, not a
  claim of stable gameplay. Dark UI elements and a guest video decoder fault
  remain unresolved.
• Jets 'n' Guns 2 no longer tears down and reopens the host audio device as
  two active output ports compete for it. Its previously confirmed playable
  and completable status is unchanged.

Ghost of Yōtei: movie audio and later scenes

Intro movies now have audio. The verified v_splash_america run starts sound at
6.3 seconds, matching the start of the audio track, instead of remaining
silent. Menu audio continues to work.

• When a dump has no package.manifest, PlayGo treats chunks 0–999 as installed
  so the game can discover its language audio package. Manifest-backed behavior
  is retained. Dialogue audio has not been verified separately.
• Decode the observed PS5 multichannel ATRAC9 layout as interleaved mono streams.
  Streams from 2 to 36 channels were checked, including 12-channel 7.1.4
  movie audio.
• Preserve playback timing for the unsupported DualSense haptics track by
  returning silence. This prevents a crash or a stalled movie audio start; it
  does not emulate controller vibration. Other unknown formats are rejected.
• Correct compute completion interrupts, preserve loading progress, recover
  window presentation, and improve resource retirement and shader preparation.

The game reaches later 3D scenes, including the tree scene below. It is still
not playable: the last measured tree scene presented 0.73 FPS, and a
subsequent loading sequence encountered Vulkan device loss. Slow streaming,
rendering artifacts, and late-scene stability remain open issues; a complete
playthrough is not claimed.

Launcher and Windows packages

• Display the release version in the launcher; this build identifies itself as
  0.3.2, also reflected in launcher and runner Windows file properties.
• Expand the library from 8 to 32 titles, with eight per page, page controls,
  and mouse-wheel navigation.
• Add Extract PKG and ship pkgextractor.exe beside the launcher and runner
  in both the portable archive and installer. The extractor supports observed
  debug FPKG layouts, inner PFS, NAPS mappings, Kraken-compressed blocks, and
  application payloads. Preserve SELF dynlib-data tails needed by extracted
  executables. Encrypted retail packages are not supported.
• Preserve a controller's left stick when keyboard WASD input is idle.
• Sign all three application executables and the installer with SHA-256
  Authenticode and a timestamp, using Artur Strazewicz / PS5PCEM. The
  certificate is self-signed, so Windows trust or SmartScreen warnings may
  still appear. SHA256SUMS.txt accompanies the downloadable packages.
• Include the bundled audio decoders' upstream license and copyright notices
  with the release documentation.

Rendering, shaders, and performance

• Run shader compilation through a worker queue, enabled by default with
  two compiler workers. Retain a title/device-specific compute shader
  warmup catalog and release temporary shader modules after use.
• Prepare graphics and compute commands on two bounded CPU workers, with
  owned command and register snapshots. Vulkan execution and visible guest
  completion remain ordered through one backend owner. This is preparation
  overlap, not independent host graphics and compute Vulkan queues.
• Avoid waits for unrelated resident buffers using timeline retirement; defer
  shader fault checks until their submissions complete. Keep upload slices and
  detile descriptors alive until their exact GPU readers retire.
• Index resource hazards and resident buffers, share identical shader words,
  reuse pipelines with dynamic viewport/scissor state, and reduce repeated
  shader analysis during fullscreen video.
• Bound image and translation caches, retry image allocation after safe
  retirement, and use a larger render-target cache for Tetris. Experimental
  internal release deferral and queued host uploads remain opt-in.
• Bind typed buffer resources for tbuffer_load_format_* and
  tbuffer_store_format_*, retain scalar resource checkpoints, and honor each
  access's own format instead of reusing another access's interpretation.
• Enable Vulkan comparison samplers only for instructions that need them, and
  use identity swizzles for depth comparison views.
• Correct layered rendering, render-target array slices, Gen5 texture
  addressing, float move sign modifiers and rounding, and branched wave64 LDS
  synchronization.
• Preserve defined register values at partial control-flow joins, lower proven
  private fragment spills, and correct selected fragment quad and minimum
  operations on 32-lane hosts.
• Publish HTILE/DCC metadata clears from simple buffer fills, including the
  observed packed R11G11B10 and RGB10A2 color formats. Speed up tiled clear edges
  without changing their addressing.

Command emulation and diagnostics

• Implement or correct AGC context state and shader resource fusion, boolean
  predication, COPY_DATA, REWIND, jump patching, primitive state, workload
  markers, packet-size queries, and multi-command-buffer submission.
• Read live copy sources and preserve packet padding and register addresses
  while patching command streams.
• Add the source-build shader-dump tool, using the same decoder as translation
  so disassembly exposes the instructions the renderer actually sees.
• Improve command-pool exhaustion messages, frame/resource timing counters,
  and safe reads of unaligned diagnostic register data.

Release validation

The three Windows applications were built with Zig 0.16.0 / ReleaseFast.
The ReleaseSafe unit run passed 1353 of 1364 tests, with one skipped and
ten failed. All ten failure names match the recorded SPIR-V baseline;
the same suite still reports one memory leak. GPU command tests passed
214/214, Vulkan tests 173/173, and HLE tests 515/515.
A ReleaseFast probe on the GPU also passed repeated RGBA16F, R11G11B10, and
RGB10A2 metadata clears through compute, PM4, and DMA paths, including partial
and mixed metadata preservation.
Builds and tests were performed with the native game process closed.

Requirements and remaining limits

Windows 10 2004 or newer, an x86-64-v3 CPU (AVX2, BMI2, FMA), and a current
Vulkan 1.2 graphics driver. AVX-512 is not required. Games, firmware, keys,
and console system libraries are not included.

The shader test suite has ten previously recorded SPIR-V failures and a reported
leak; the full suite is not green. Small GPU probes and menu captures do not
establish whole-game stability. See the
compatibility table
and the
Yōtei performance report
for build-specific evidence and limitations.

Full commit history since 0.3.1-beta.1