The paper contributes to the topic of (purely) catalytic P systems. Catalytic P systems represent the original and likely the simplest class of membrane computing models. It is known that (purely) catalytic P systems with two (respectively three) catalysts and one membrane can simulate any Minsky register machine and, hence, they are computationally complete. However, the problem of minimal size of such a universal catalytic P system remains open for about ten years. We improve known results about small catalytic P systems simulating register machines in three different modes (generating, accepting, computing functions). Together with some specific universal register machine [7] , one could eventually construct a small universal catalytic P system. As a consequence, we also improve the previous construction of a minimal catalytic P system generating a non-semilinear set, diminishing the number of necessary rules from 29 to 24. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]