Tetris® Forever

Community report notes

Runs well end to end. The game reaches controllable gameplay: I played a full round of Tetris Time Warp to a deliberate top-out and returned to the menus afterwards. Session was 3 min 25 s / 12,186 frames with no crash.

Working

• Boot sequence: Digital Eclipse intro video, photosensitivity notice, quote cards, title screen.
• All three .webm background videos play visibly (digital_eclipse, timeline_bg_1, timeline_bg_2) - no black frames.
• Museum / timeline mode: browsing, thumbnails, box art, video backgrounds.
• Tetris Time Warp: playable, including the mid-round era switch that loads the embedded NES ROM.
• Audio: SDL device opened at 48 kHz stereo; music and SFX correct throughout.
• Save data: timeline_progress.json and recently_played.json created, written, and read back from /savedata0.
• Input: keyboard default mapping fully responsive.

Performance

• ~59.3 fps average across the whole session; the title bar held 59.98-60.00.
• Across the 5,400-frame gameplay window the worst frame was 1.1x the mean and no frame exceeded 3x - no traversal stutter and no shader-compile stalls (all 8 shaders were compiled by t=72 s, before gameplay started).

Rendering

• 8 shaders total (2 VS, 6 PS); every one reported structured CFG success, wave64, each under 1 ms.
• Colour targets at 3840x2160 and 1920x1080 plus a 960 -> 480 -> 240 downsample chain (blur/bloom), composited to the 1080p swapchain. No MSAA (samples=1).

Clean signals - zero of each: fatal errors, unresolved import stubs, missing shader opcodes, Vulkan validation errors, device-lost.

Non-fatal warnings observed (nothing visibly wrong on screen)

• 126x size_bytes / base is not 256-byte aligned - the game issues ACQUIRE_MEM GCR cache flushes over 32-byte regions; the emulator warns and over-flushes.
• 16x unsupported PS5 guard band discard = 1.000000, 1.000000, continuing - the values are a no-op here.
• 16x ignoring indirect uc reg GE_STEREO_CNTL - stereo disabled (value 0), safely ignored.
• The game calls sceAgcInit(..., ver = 13) but GRAPHICS_REGISTER_DEFAULTS_MAX_VERSION is 12, so register defaults clamp to v12 (unsupported version 13 x3). No visible effect in this title, but newer-SDK titles may need a v13 table.

Steps to reproduce

1. Place a decrypted PPSA25646 dump (eboot.bin, sce_sys/, sce_module/libc.prx, assets/) in a game folder.
2. Launch it:

kyty_emulator.exe --game "<dump dir>" --screen-width 1920 --screen-height 1080 --printf-direction File (or add the folder in the launcher and run it from there)

3. Wait through the intro video, photosensitivity notice and quote cards to the title screen.
4. Press Cross (J on keyboard) at "PRESS X TO PLAY".
5. Navigate to Tetris Time Warp and start a round.
6. Play until top-out - the game-over screen appears and the score/progress save is written.

Expected behavior

No known issue. Everything tested behaves as expected: the game reaches gameplay, holds 60 fps, plays its videos and audio, and persists save data. The items listed under "Result details" are non-fatal log warnings rather than visible defects, noted in case they are useful.

Extra notes

• Settings: defaults except resolution 1920x1080 and printf_direction = File. Shader validation on, Vulkan validation off, vblank 60, console language 1 (en-US).
• Build: stock upstream c52bf45, clean working tree (no local modifications), built with clang-cl 20.1.8 and Qt 6.10.3.
• Startup memory: the emulator maps a single ~13.5 GB pagefile-backed section at startup (PhysicalMemory::TotalSize() = 13,824 MB, committed eagerly). On this 16 GB machine that fails with direct-memory backing: CreateFileMapping failed: 0x000005aa whenever system commit charge is high; closing a browser freed enough to start. Mentioning it only in case it is useful for lower-RAM hosts - happy to raise it separately if it warrants its own issue.
• Absent from the dump and logged as "Can't open" (no observed effect): sce_sys/playgo-chunk.dat, playgo-chunkdefs.xml, Data/chunkmanifest.