Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland [BLES01593]

Hello! I just wanted to share what I've found out about this game in case it helps debugging or something.

First of all I was testing with these settings:

PPU Decoder: Recompiler (LLVM)
SPU Decoder: Recompiler (ASMJIT)
Load liblv2.sprx only
Renderer: Vulkan

The game runs at smooth 60FPS without any kind of hiccup once shaders are compiled. The list of graphical glitches are as follows:

• When there is a dialogue with portraits and when the objectives are shown on the upper bar, sometimes lines of text are completely black bars https://i.imgur.com/ZjsmwId.png & https://i.imgur.com/OAEBpBm.png
  
• Backgrounds in dialogue with portraits are black. https://i.imgur.com/4zf1lMQ.png
  

The second issue is fixed just enabling Write Color Buffers, although they don't scale properly when the scale is something different than 100%, but that's rather minor. The first one is actually fixed with Strict Rendering Mode enabled. Obviously if you enable either of these the game no longer runs at a constant 60 FPS, changing to 20~60 FPS with my PC.

Once you are able to save in the game and Rufus gives you your first assignment, there is a synthesizing tutorial. When you select the first ingredient and are about to choose from your 5 items, the game crashes. I read about that in the post above this one and changed the SPU Decoder, but that didn't do much. Changing the PPU Decoder to Interpreter (fast) did however let me complete the tutorial without a problem, and the game didn't crash anymore between transitions, or at least for the duration of what I played since the game gets much slower, especially at loading screens (expected, really). But I played for about 20-30 minutes with battles, synthesizing, cutscenes, main story progression, dialogue, jumping and nothing really happened. Everything at a painful 12 FPS though.

I did so much testing that I don't know if I should upload any logs as I don't know which one would be useful. If anyone wants one just ask, and I'll try to upload it. I mean, all the phyreengine games are so close to be playable at full speed that it's actually kind of irritating. This also makes me wonder if this should be labelled as playable, as it seems it is with the proper settings even if it's awfully slow at times.

Well running with PPU Interpreter just changes timing enough to make the race condition(s) not so likely to trigger. But they are still there. Even if it works for one person it might not for another.

However the recent removal of MFC thread might have helped? Seems better on my end. Or just random.

Actually, I goofed, it's PPU Recompiler, not SPU Recompiler. Anyway, the issue remains.