Testing

Resources¶

Compatibility Reporting¶

Anyone is welcome to submit an updated compatibility report.
In order to submit a report, you will need an authorization token, which can be acquired after getting the Tester role on the xemu Discord server.
To make reporting simple, reports are filed from within xemu. This lets us also include details about the game and the system the report is being made on.

Testing guide¶

Look at last report on the game's compatibility page for context. Take note of Known Issues section and last tester's description.
Play the game for a while.
If you find bugs:
- If the issue was not reported yet (not shown on the Known Issues section of the compatibility page), create a new issue.
  - Select the Title Issue template if you're reporting an issue with a game.
  - Issues should be about one specific thing. If you find multiple problems, you can file multiple issues.
  - Maybe this behavior looks like a bug but happens on real hardware. In this case, still file the bug and we'll tag it with not-an-emulation-bug so we don't waste time looking into it again in the future.
  - Your new issue will appear on the game's compatibility page within an hour.
- If you see bugs listed on the report page that are fixed, help update them.
If your experience is worse than the last reported status, try to figure out why:
- Maybe your game dump is bad?
- Maybe your cache is corrupt?
- Maybe your hardware is too low end? See here for some performance troubleshooting.
- Maybe xemu regressed? Try the last tester's version of xemu for comparison on your machine.
To create the report in xemu select Help → Report Compatibility.
- Briefly describe your experience.
- When selecting playability level:
  - Recall open issues for the game. If there's something that causes the game to crash in xemu, it should probably not be classified as Playable.
  - Playable is most likely the status you should pick unless the experience is very bad (Broken-Starts) or you completed the game and you believe the experience matches hardware (Perfect).
  - If the game is not in Playable/Perfect status, there should be at least one issue filed tracking whatever the problems are with the game.
- Once your report is filed, it should appear on the site within an hour.

Reachability¶

There may be follow-up questions about your compatibility report, either on the Discord server or GitHub if you've filed an issue. Staying reachable helps us resolve issues more effectively. If we're unable to get in touch after reasonable attempts, the associated tester role may be removed to ensure active participation.

On playing "100%" of a game¶

While thorough testing is appreciated, it's not practical to demand volunteer testers play a game entirely every time a new version of xemu is released. Therefore, for Playable status we do not require a complete playthrough of the game. Instead, we request that people report issues as they run into them and we will operate with available knowledge. If there are severe issues with a game, it will recieve a different label. If you do complete a game, we would like to know about it. Let us know on Discord.