PCSX2 is an open source PS2 Emulator

This emulator was great but always felt dated and clunky compared to things like RPCS3 and Dolphin. After their reboot using QT framework, it become so much smoother and easier to use. It&#x27;s wonderful! It&#x27;s really plug and play.<p>Unfortunately even with a 12900k and a literal RTX 4090, Shadow of The Colossus still lags below 60fps in many situations. That&#x27;s my &quot;white whale&quot; for PS2, like Metal Gear Solid 4 is for PS3. That game also doesn&#x27;t work perfectly in it&#x27;s PS3 emulator.<p>Here&#x27;s what the update dialog looks like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;fky7br.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;fky7br.png</a><p>Here&#x27;s what the emulator itself looks like with real usage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;pa3m30.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.catbox.moe&#x2F;pa3m30.png</a>

Used it for the first time a couple months ago.<p>* Plays original copies from your computer&#x27;s DVD drive (which may be a bit slower to respond than original hardware though)<p>* Plays Grandia III very well on my 2012 laptop (3rd-gen i5 and integrated GPU) (needed to change some interlacing settings to get rid of some flashing). Also obviously allows you to save anywhere you want. The original game doesn&#x27;t have any save points in dungeons! Possibly only playable on an emulator? :p<p>* PS3 and USB-HID controller support<p>* Didn&#x27;t play my Taiko no Tatsujin copy very well, but maybe my system isn&#x27;t quite up to the task

There were a handful of successful online PS2 games. SOCOM and FinalFantasy were 2 but there was another called EverQuest Online Adventures (EQOA). That game was shut down in 2013 and there’s a group of former players that are trying to resurrect it. The main way to play what is left post-end of life is using PCSX2.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectreturnhome.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectreturnhome.com&#x2F;</a>

I remember the headaches I used to get after long sessions of God of War on PCSX2 v0.9.6 at 5-10 fps on a pentium dual core. Can&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s been over a decade.

Similar to this, you should know that with a network adapter and a hacked memory card, it&#x27;s possible to play backup PS2 games from a NAS. However, you will have to downgrade your NAS&#x27;s security to allow SMBv1. And not all games run smoothly over the network (nor do all games run smoothly off hard drives, solid state drives, USBs, or SD cards, which are also options). If you have the architecture and want to future proof your PS2 (lasers are dying fast), it&#x27;s worth an afternoon getting it running. Keywords to get your started: OPL; FreeMcBoot.

I designed the icons for the Mac OS X port many years ago.<p>FWIW, don&#x27;t let the &quot;alpha&quot; label fool you, AetherSX2 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aethersx2.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aethersx2.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;</a>) works like a charm on this M1 Mac. Admittedly, I only tested a couple of games, but it has been much better than PCSX2 in every possible way so far.

I use this to play the Ace Combat games on my PC using a high-end flight simulation HOTAS. It&#x27;s like having a home arcade cabinet and a lot of fun! I ripped the DVDs myself using a standard DVD drive, and you can use FreeMCBoot to legally rip a BIOS from a PS2.

Yeah, it’s been around for like 15 years or more.

I remember forever ago I was trying to play DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 on this emulator which was at version 0.9.4 at the time. The game lagged on my weak PC and I was fiddling with the settings on a daily basis trying to make it run better. I got to learn all of the settings and what they do. I finished the game even if it was laggy. What a great time.

I played through my copy of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance on PCSX2. It ran great.<p>You don&#x27;t have to suffer through wonky PC ports.

I just want to know why they removed it from retroarch

Dumb Question: why can&#x27;t these emulators be built on top of QEMU? That seems to support a crazy amount of &quot;hardware&quot; - different CPU, BIOS, Audio shit, etc.<p>Is it, in theory, possible to make, eg Atari 2600 (or NES, or Sega) emulator from QEMU?

Is there any open source PS2 SDK available?<p>AFAIK DevKitPro (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devkitpro.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devkitpro.org</a>) doesn&#x27;t support PS yet...

The USB adapter situation feels really messy atm; which is a shame cos the main things I want to play are weird peripheral things. Seems like that whole codebase needs to be rewritten?<p>Would love to patch it so Singstar worked with the official dongle 2 player (atm it treats the dongle like any other mic, which means both slots only provide one side of a stereo input source). Zero c++ experience but feels like it would be doable.

I remember playing Onimusha 4 with like 8x the internal resolution, god it was so fucking cool. PCSX2 is an amazing project that gave me tons of entertainment. It was also one of the first projects I interacted with in a technical way as a teenager - I would monitor the commits and, when something interesting got in, I&#x27;d build optimized versions of it that targeted different hardware.

There is also a libretro core for PCSX2, now renamed to LRPS2 to accentuate its independent development. It plays many games fine but the project doesn’t see close to the frequency of development and improvement as PCSX2.

The latest progress report is Q1 &#x2F; 2022. Does anyone know what the current status of the project is?

...and thanks to it I&#x27;ll someday finish Dragon Quest VIII.<p>Thanks for the great work.

has anyone tried the Qt nightlies on MacOS?