Resident Mode

The Resident mode card sits at the top of Home. Turn on its toggle and Playto waits in the background — no profile to pick, no region to draw, nothing to configure first.

When a game comes to the front, a small bar appears at the top right of that game's window. Everything you need to read the screen is on it, so you never have to alt-tab back to the Playto window to get going.

Playto has to be running for the bar to appear, but the window does not have to be open — minimizing to the tray is enough.

Folded, the bar is a single line:

• Status — a legend of the shortcut keys that work right now, in the mode you are in.
• Auto-translate — the switch that turns continuous reading on and off.
• Stop — appears while a session is running.
• Expand — the arrow that opens the rest of the controls.

Hovering the bar expands it; moving the pointer away folds it again. Drag it anywhere on the game window if the top right is in the way — the position is remembered per game, so each game keeps the spot you chose for it.

The bar is excluded from screen capture, so it does not turn up in screenshots or recordings.

Two rhythms, and you can switch between them at any point:

• Read once — press the read key when a line you want is on screen. Nothing runs in between, which is the lightest way to play.
• Auto-translate — flip the switch on the bar and Playto keeps reading as the screen changes, until you press Stop.

The default keys:

• F4 — read the screen once
• F2 — start / stop
• F3 — pause
• F5 — show / hide the overlay

All four are rebindable under TOOLS › Shortcuts, which is worth doing if one of them is already taken by your game. The bar's status line always shows the keys as you have them bound, not the defaults.

Expanding the bar gives you the settings you actually change mid-game:

• How to read — cursor, fixed frame, or the whole window.
• Place a frame — draw the rectangle Playto reads from, without leaving the game.
• Show capture frame — outline the area being read, so you can see what is inside it.
• Game audio — transcribe spoken lines alongside the on-screen text.
• Text size and background — two sliders for the overlay, for when the translation is hard to read against a bright scene.
• Where the translation appears — Bottom, Near text or Custom. With fixed regions, Bottom and Near text apply to every region at once; to give regions different positions, use the region card (see Learning).

These choices are remembered per game. Come back to the same game tomorrow and the bar is already set the way you left it.

If you switch to another game you have played before, the session moves over to it after a moment and keeps the same reading mode. You do not stop one session and start another — the bar follows what you are looking at.

Games are not the only target. Browser windows are read like anything else, so a browser game or a wiki page in another language gets the same bar. For that case in detail, see how to translate browser games.

Not everything you launch is something you want to read. The bar gives you two ways out:

• × (Close the bar) — on the status row, in every state, including mid-session. You can show the bar again from the Home screen.
• Never for this game — in the expanded rows when the bar offers itself. Permanent: that game is skipped from then on.

Nothing is lost either way: excluded games are listed in Settings → Capture, under Resident mode, and removing one from that list brings the bar back.

A demanding game and a local model both want VRAM. When there is not enough free memory to load the model, the bar says so instead of failing quietly, and offers two ways to keep reading:

• CPU — run the model on the processor instead. Slower, but it leaves the graphics card to the game.
• Cloud — translate through Playto Cloud, which uses no VRAM at all.

Lowering the game's own graphics settings frees VRAM too, and is worth trying if you would rather stay local.

If you place a fixed frame, how you draw it affects how stable recognition is:

• Keep the edges off the text — let the frame's edges rest on blank margin instead of cutting through characters.
• Give it vertical room — box the whole text with a little margin above and below; a slightly taller frame beats a tight one.
• Exclude the name plate and UI — capturing just the dialogue reads cleanest.

While text is still animating in, or when a dense multi-line subtitle is on screen, recognition can briefly flicker before it settles — that is expected. If a frame lands on Playto's own window or runs off the game window, Playto warns you and offers Redraw. Frames you place belong to the game's profile, so they come back with it; see Region for the details.