- A new launcher. The menu was rebuilt. Five sections sit on a rail at the left (Home, Library, Multiplayer, Settings, About): L1 and R1 go from one to the next, and Left from a screen's edge opens the rail. Home is built around the game to continue, with its cover and what it runs with. The Library shows your games as covers, with the chosen game's details beside them. A game's settings are a page of their own, and Settings is a board of tiles.
- Themes. The launcher's look is a theme, chosen in Settings > Theme. This version comes with one, Canopy; docs/THEMES.md says what a theme is made of.
- An opening. ProsperoEden appears out of the console's own launch picture without a cut: its mark comes forward over the picture, then goes to its place as the menu arrives. Any button skips it, and it plays only when the app is started.
- A loading screen with the game's cover. While a game starts, its cover stands in the middle with a line of light going round it as the start advances, in front of the cover's own colours. Under it are the step the start is at, the shaders built so far, and the seconds a slow step has lasted.
- The controller's buttons are drawn. Settings > Controls and the button mapping show Touchpad, L1, R1 and the other buttons as pictures instead of names.
- Game settings from the home screen. The button beside Play, and Triangle on the game to continue or on a recent game, open that game's settings.
- Demanding games keep their frame rate in heavy scenes. A game that times its own frames could fall from 30 to 20 frames a second whenever its frames came a few percent late. The clock the game reads now gives by up to 15% in those moments: the game keeps its frame rate and runs a little slower instead. Sound, the display and timeouts keep the real clock.
- Full speed on newer system software. On consoles where the system does not tell the processor's cores apart, the emulator's threads were left to share cores and games ran markedly slower. The cores are now found by a timing, and each thread gets its own.
- No more drops to 10 or 15 frames a second in new scenery. Textures in a format the PS5's GPU cannot read (ASTC) were converted inside the draw that first used them, which held up the whole frame. In play they are now converted in the background; on loading screens, menus and title screens they are still converted at once, so those pictures appear complete.
- ASTC textures (new setting). Settings > Video > ASTC textures, also in each game's settings. Compressed (the default) keeps such textures as BC3, a quarter of the graphics memory they need decoded; Full quality keeps them decoded.
- "Ran out of graphics memory" far less often. Four causes are fixed. The count of graphics memory in use read twice what was held, so games were refused memory that was free. ASTC textures took four times the memory they need. The reserve that memory is freed for was smaller than a game can ask for at once. And memory the app keeps for its whole life sat in the middle of the pool, so every game after the first had less room in one piece.
- Fewer freezes and long frames. Freeing textures when graphics memory ran short could stop the picture for half a second. A game that read unmapped memory in bursts stalled for up to a second on its own log lines. And the graphics driver held up one frame every ten seconds, in every game, to write a line of statistics. All three are gone.
- A crash with "jumped to an unmapped address" is fixed. It came from where the console happened to place the game's memory, so it struck some starts and not others.
- RNG seed per game (new). In a game's settings under System. With a seed the game is loaded at the same place in memory at every start, which some mods need. Contributed by EIREXE.
- Games that open the microphone no longer crash. Contributed by rpromas.
- Faster CPU emulation no longer turns off the fast path for a game's exclusive memory accesses when it is switched on. Contributed by OverkillLabs.
- PS5 OpenGL SDK 1.0.2 for the launcher and the OpenGL renderer (it was 1.0.0). A game whose shaders are compiled inside its first frames is no longer ended on its first run with the OpenGL renderer, the menu no longer loses a frame of about 180 ms every few seconds while Write logs at once is on, and drawing fixes from Mihawk and mpereiraesaa are in.
- A single Joy-Con held upright. A game that gives a player one Joy-Con to hold upright is played with the whole DualSense: the shapes are that Joy-Con's four buttons, the D-pad and either stick are its stick, and L1/R1 and L2/R2 are its shoulder buttons.
Thanks to the people whose work is in this release:
- Bauls Deep, for the texture collector's lookahead, where the fix for the half-second freezes began, and for the development timers and the recorded-input replay.
- EIREXE, for the RNG seed per game.
- rpromas, for finding and fixing the crash in games that open the microphone.
- OverkillLabs, for the fix that keeps the fast path for exclusive memory accesses with Faster CPU emulation on.
- Mihawk and mpereiraesaa, for the drawing fixes in the OpenGL SDK, and Mihawk for the Vulkan driver all of this runs on.
And to everyone who tests ProsperoEden on their own console and reports what they find.