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PCSX2 is an open source PS2 Emulator
- mproud 3y agoYeah, it’s been around for like 15 years or more.
- iknowSFR 3y agoThere 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. https://www.projectreturnhome.com/ https://www.projectreturnhome.com/
- lapetitejort 3y agoSimilar to this, you should know that with a network adapter and a hacked memory card, it's possible to play backup PS2 games from a NAS. However, you will have to downgrade your NAS'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's worth an afternoon getting it running. Keywords to get your started: OPL; FreeMcBoot.
- dharmab 3y agoI use a SATA SSD in my PS2. I buy used games and rip them directly to the drive.
- p1necone 3y agoI have this setup, it's pretty awesome. Afaik you can't put a HDD bigger than 1TB in a PS2 so it's the only way to go if you want the set and forget experience of just having the entire PS2 library available to you. You can load games from an external drive over the USB port too but the transfer speeds are much slower than the disc drive so most games have issues. MC2SIO recently came out though, which uses the memory card interface to access games on a microsd card - my understanding is that the transfer speeds over that are much better so it's also a good option.
- Cloudef 3y agoThe 1TB limit was removed lately by software update, also you can nowadays use exfat filesystem which removes that slow game install process with that one tool.
- RajT88 3y agoI have it as well. PS2 softmods are getting better and better - you can now use PS4 controllers over Bluetooth. Ps1 games all can be launched from OPL since they are not run via emulation.
- p1necone 3y ago> Ps1 games all can be launched from OPL since they are not run via emulation. I think you've got this backwards - the only way to run ps1 games from OPL is via POPstarter, which is an emulator. Speed/compatibility is not great for a lot of titles either. The reason for this is that when you put an actual PS1 disc into a PS2 the system uses the PS1 CPU inside as the main CPU (it's used as an audio co-processor when in PS2 mode), and there's no way for OPL to trigger this while still loading from the ISO in the background.
- Cloudef 3y ago
- nikanj 3y agoThe latest progress report is Q1 / 2022. Does anyone know what the current status of the project is?
- fein 3y agoI get update alerts just about every day when I open the emu. Haven't noticed any difference with the games I'm playing on it which all work seemingly fine, although shadow of the colossus is sometimes finicky.
- glonq 3y agoSadly, one of the team memembers died in Jan 2022. Was he essential for continuing development, or is that just an unfortunate coincidence?
- bluefinity 3y agoHe only made 4 commits to the repo, so probably not.
- scq 3y agoIt appears to be fairly active on GitHub, with several commits per day: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2 https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2
- insanitybit 3y agoOh, huh. They didn't use Github when I was using the emulator. It was all subversion.
- insanitybit 3y agoI 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'd build optimized versions of it that targeted different hardware.
- dharmab 3y agoI use this to play the Ace Combat games on my PC using a high-end flight simulation HOTAS. It'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.
- sergiotapia 3y agoThis 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's wonderful! It's really plug and play. Unfortunately even with a 12900k and a literal RTX 4090, Shadow of The Colossus still lags below 60fps in many situations. That's my "white whale" for PS2, like Metal Gear Solid 4 is for PS3. That game also doesn't work perfectly in it's PS3 emulator. Here's what the update dialog looks like: https://files.catbox.moe/fky7br.png https://files.catbox.moe/fky7br.png Here's what the emulator itself looks like with real usage: https://files.catbox.moe/pa3m30.png https://files.catbox.moe/pa3m30.png
- Zircom 3y agoTo be fair shadow of the Colossus has pretty bad frame rates even on the original hardware, averaging 15-20 fps. So I'd say if anything that's an accurate recreation of the original experience :)
- rzzzt 3y agoFrom https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-colossus-pal-ps2/resources/making_of_sotc.pdf https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c... : > Well, SOTC is a game whose frame rate can increase and decrease > wildly. Actually, we have incorporate the variable frame rate > in the design - it increases and decreases with load balancing. > Although there are cases when it reaches 60 fps, there are also > times when it falls to the 15 fps range, but the motion blur helps > to smooth over this, and the player's sensation of frame rate > changes is held down to a minimum. Does the PS4 remake fare better?
- zerocrates 3y agoThe remake is a consistent 30 fps, or an optional consistent 60 fps mode on the Pro (or PS5).
- swinglock 3y agoWhat does "load balancing" mean in this context?
- axblount 3y agoI played through my copy of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance on PCSX2. It ran great. You don't have to suffer through wonky PC ports.
- tombert 3y agoI enjoyed MGS2 while playing it but I’m not 100% convinced that anyone actually knows what the hell happened at the last ~15%.
- tadfisher 3y agoHm? A cabal of AIs named after dead presidents gets infected by a virus written by Otacon's sister, and call you repeating corrupted nonsense (I need scissors! 61!) while you sneak naked through Arsenal Gear. Snake shows up and gives you your gear and a katana. You then fight 100 dudes, then have to fight 30 Metal Gear Rays on the deck of Arsenal Gear. AG crashes into Wall Street (they removed that cutscene because of 9/11), then you fight Snake's long-lost brother/clone who happens to be the former President of the United States and attacks you with mechanical octopus arms. The AIs call you and tell you that you performed perfectly, because the whole game was a simulation they devised to find the perfect Solid Snake alternative to infiltrate and kill the President, because the President was going to kill their plans to control the Internet and selectively bias information dispersal to control humanity and promote order, and Snake wasn't going along with their plans. Then you find your girlfriend in lower Manhattan where everyone is just walking around like a 3000-ton mechanized warship didn't just take out the entire neighborhood. What's hard to understand?
- dclowd9901 3y agoThis is such a beautiful summary. I love Kojima games. I don’t even try to explain to people what the gist is there.
- tombert 3y agoYou’re right. I’m an idiot, when you explain it like that it’s so obvious.
- qiqitori 3y agoUsed it for the first time a couple months ago. * Plays original copies from your computer's DVD drive (which may be a bit slower to respond than original hardware though) * 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't have any save points in dungeons! Possibly only playable on an emulator? :p * PS3 and USB-HID controller support * Didn't play my Taiko no Tatsujin copy very well, but maybe my system isn't quite up to the task
- doubled112 3y agoSave states have made it so much easier for me to be an adult AND play games. Oh, kids are yelling? Take a save state. Phone is ringing? Save state. I can't be in my 30s and tell people "sorry, I was making my way to a save point".
- legendofbrando 3y agoAmen to this
- Clamchop 3y agoBeing able to shut down at any time is very nice, but what of pause?
- doubled112 3y agoI could pause, but I can't be sure if I'm coming back in 10 minutes, or if I'll forget all about it and come back in 10 days.
- Clamchop 3y agoReminds me of leaving my Nintendo on to not lose progress.
- asveikau 3y ago
- asynchronyse 3y agoI 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't believe it's been over a decade.
- atum47 3y ago...and thanks to it I'll someday finish Dragon Quest VIII. Thanks for the great work.
- anta40 3y agoIs there any open source PS2 SDK available? AFAIK DevKitPro (https://devkitpro.org https://devkitpro.org) doesn't support PS yet...
- djbusby 3y agoDumb Question: why can't these emulators be built on top of QEMU? That seems to support a crazy amount of "hardware" - different CPU, BIOS, Audio shit, etc. Is it, in theory, possible to make, eg Atari 2600 (or NES, or Sega) emulator from QEMU?
- profile53 3y agoBasically because of very precise hardware timings. One tick/cycle of the CPU must correspond to exactly X ticks of the GPU since the code runs very close to the hardware and depends on specific behaviors (e.g. a memory store to this bank takes 4 cycles while this other bank takes 6 cycles). Qemu takes a higher level approach that basically guarantees that over a period of time, one tick of the CPU corresponds to X ticks of the GPU on average and does expose a fair amount of host memory performance characteristics such as TLB/L1/L2 cache misses. PS2 games weren’t built to account for pipeline flushes or memory stalls, for example.
- NovaDudely 3y agoYep, Ps2 was a beast of interconnected timings, data transfer and cache oddities. I still find it so funny that they figured the best way to run the GPU was to have 2560 bit wide data bus on 4MB of RAM. So you could go fill rate crazy but on a very limited data set.
- SXX 3y agoHere is humble opinion of a person who is not QEMU developer, but looked at it's code more than once for purpose of debugging my gaming VMs with VFIO. QEMU is a great project, but to begin with flexibility was not a primary design goal. Majority of QEMU targets are PC-like hardware and older consoles have unique or alien architecture. To emulate it using QEMU you'll have to patch it internals heavily. It's also written in C so you can't just integrate a lot of fancy libraries into it. QEMU is also important infrastructure project playing crucial part in *nix virtualization stack. Which means getting any code upstreamed is hard. Emulation projects primary goal is to make games run both accurately and as fast as possible which means developers will use as many shortcuts as possible. QEMU is a massive code base too. Getting into it will take a lot of time and it could be easier to maintain single-target emulator instead since it's easier for new contributors to start working on it. You'll have to fork QEMU anyway and won't be able to push your changes upstream then what the point to use it?
- drewbitt 3y agoThere 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.
- bpiche 3y agoI just want to know why they removed it from retroarch
- grecy 3y agohas anyone tried the Qt nightlies on MacOS?
- Sebastian_09 3y agoYes surprisingly worked out of the box with great perf on a M1 Pro (stable 50fps) for two games I tried (latest nightly from the front page, 1.7xx)
- christkv 3y agoYes they work pretty well.
- johncoltrane 3y agoI designed the icons for the Mac OS X port many years ago. FWIW, don't let the "alpha" label fool you, AetherSX2 (https://www.aethersx2.com/archive/ https://www.aethersx2.com/archive/) 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.
- CivBase 3y ago> AetherSX2 development is indefinitely suspended. Due to neverending impersonating, complaints, demands, and now death threats, I'm done. > Update 2023/01/10: I no longer have any active online presence in any community. Anyone claiming to be Tahlreth, or represent AetherSX2, is impersonating and scamming you. I hope the threats and hate will stop now. Well that's disheartening :(
- mmmrk 3y agoI've seen this plenty of times before. What is it with emulation and drama/toxicity?
- johncoltrane 3y agoYou can find it in every small scene that lives at the fringe of legality. These tend to attract a very specific kind of weirdo with extreme personalities and when those weirdos also happen to have the chops necessary for translating obscure Super Famicom games and building passable emulators you immediately have ego issues and the dramas that come with them. Sure, there are lots of people who load their translated roms into emulators without any drama, but they are just as part of the emulation scene as torrent users are part of the warez scene. It is how much you are involved.
- HanClinto 3y agoWonderful, thank you!
- radiKal07 3y agoI 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.
- JansjoFromIkea 3y agoThe 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? 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.