Full disclosure. Big fan of the PS 2 here. Some of my favorite all-time console games, if not actual games… Continue reading PlayStation 2 emulation is now so good you don’t really need original hardware to enjoy its classics, as new PCSX2 version 2 is released
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Full disclosure. Big fan of the PS 2 here. Some of my favorite all-time console games, if not actual games on any format live on the system, which is why I have a couple of them tucked away in my games room.
As time moves on though I am very much aware that they will ultimately fail. I have already replaced the CD drive’s laser units but these may not be available forever, nor is messing around inside old hardware something everybody enjoys. To combat wear and tear I put my entire PS2 game library on a hard drive and, using the magic of people on the internet can stream my game roms to my PS2 over ethernet. This is very cool, but also not for everybody, as Samba sharing can be a PITA.
The alternative to all of this is the (already before today) mightily impressive PCSX2 emulator, which over the years has come so far and can now pretty much play anything you throw at it with a few caveats here and there.
Now though, this has all changed again with a huge version leap from 1.7 to version 2 bringing so many new features it takes about 10 minutes to read through the blog post explaining them all. And this isn’t just some coder’s bullet point list that nobody else can understand, the post takes you through what’s been done, by whom, and why and every single change is a game-changer for PCSX2.
I’ve been playing around with it here all morning and it seems to my eye, pretty much flawless already and the big ‘advantage’ to playing on a real console is the upscaling for modern displays.
Don’t get me wrong, I am old school and have my PlayStation 2 hooked up to my retro-gaming pride and joy, a 32-inch Sony Trinitron that weighs as much as a small ape but there is something that makes me smile about seeing my favorite games on a 4k monitor, upscaled to 4k perfectly. And with the addition of one of the many user-made texture replacement packs you can easily update the actual in-game graphics of your favorite games to look, well exception.
Take a look at the two screenshots below of Tekken 5 – both are running on the emulator but the first is normal and the second has a 4k texture pack replacement. Does that look like a game that is almost 20 years old?
A lot of the changes in PCSX2 are massive but the benefit is a significant bump in your gaming quality of life.
A switch to the Vulkan engine ensures future compatibility going forward and gone are all the various plugins you would have needed to get things up and running. You no longer need to tweak your game setting for the best results if you don’t want to now, the emulator deals with all that for you and it even comes with cheats and hacks included so you don’t need to fish around on the internet for them anymore, you simply need to tick a box to apply them. Want to play God of War 2 with a widescreen hack? Tick.
If space is a problem on your SSD or HD, PCSX now finally can read CHD files (compressed hard drive) which means you can, with the help of a tool or tool, compress the living daylights out of your library at no performance cost. Heck, the entire PS2 library of all those DVDs can now fit on a 3TB drive.
And finally, for this page at least because there is so much more we could write about if we had time, but some classic games such as the Burnout series now run correctly, whereas before the skybox wasn’t working properly. Now you can upscale Burnout and play it on your 4K projector if you have one and it will look very smart.
The work that has been done on the PCSX2 emulator is truly exciting and along with the recent news we brought you about the Dolphin emulator’s massive improvements also, it has been a great few weeks for retro gaming emulation.
Now if only we could find a way to the stop to corporates just deleting our games from their digital libraries.
If this is not your first dabble with emulators there is nothing here to scare you off. If it is, then have a read around the subject matter a little as you are going to need a PS2 bios file and dumps of your (legally owned) game ROMs. You will also need a relatively decent spec PC. We aren’t talking about needing a 4090 here but a more recent GPU is going to help a lot.
Emulation is a grey area but we are not talking about Nintendo going after Yuzu here as the Switch is a current console. The act of PS2 preservation is here and there are so many great games in its library, it’s criminal either not to revisit them or try out some of them for the first time.
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