PCSX2

PCSX2 is a Playstation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux. It has been started by the team behind PCSX (PS1 emulator) back in 2002. The development remains mostly active through all these years. The emulator archived some playable speeds only by mid-2007 and the later versions have improved speed and compatibility making it both the ultimate solution for PS2 emulation and the instrument to keep and preserve the PS2 legacy in the modern world. Though not yet perfect the program can successfully emulate most of the commercial games for PS2 in playable speeds and good visuals (often even better than the original PS2 had ever archived).

Up until now the program has plugin architecture making it possible to expand it's capabilities by attaching additional plugins. Although the plugins are numbered and unlikely to increase their quantity in the near future the plugin approach still has its positive moments (it's possible to use newly updated plugins without changing the version of the main program and vice versa). As of late 2009 the program only supports x86 architecture and can efficiently use no more than 2 cores on multicore CPUs (1 core is used for the main emulation purposes and the second is for plugins' purposes like rendering graphics, output sounds or PAD works). While the increase of number of useful cores may happen in the future it still remains a mystery when this will happen because the division of the general emulation thread into two or more is a very hard and complex task (original PS2 has multi CPU architecture and the correct timing between emulated CPUs is complicated enough without dividing every CPU into more than one thread).

Mac OS X is not officially supported but you can still run PCSX2 under it.

Current PCSX2 notable features:

• Recompilers for Emotion Engine (EE), Vector Unit 0 (VU0) and Vector Unit 1 (VU1). They are used to translate some parts of PS2 original machine code into x86 machine code, making the executing of it many times faster than the usual emulation. Due to the fact that PS2 machine code is absolutely different in almost every way possible from x86 these recompilers are probably the most complicated parts in PCSX2.
• Dual core support makes PCSX2 use up to 2 cores speeding up the emulator significantly.
• Proper SPU2 emulation helps to hear the real or even enhanced PS2 sound on the PC which is not the trivial task considered the lack of documentaion and the fact that it has to synchronize with many emulated processors.
• Full gamepad support makes it possible to emulate every Dual Shock 2 feature so no game will be unbeatable because of the PAD problems.
• Patch system helps to create cheats for any game easily so you won't be frustrated when you cannot progress because of the extremely hard game boss. Also it can be used to patch code skipping some parts where emulation is still broken (which ultimately can make the game playable). This feature is quite user-friendly and easy to use.
• Many optimizations (hacks) which tricks out the emulation making it faster where it could be very slow without them. You will be able to play certain games on the lower-end machines thanks to this feature.
• Fully working memcards support. Which could prove some problematic because the lack of documentation made the developers reverse engineered this feature and saving/loading sometimes used to result in corruption of memcard before this complicated process was finished.
• Fully working IPU support responsible for FMV (like MPEG videos for example). Now you can enjoy all the videos in cut scenes the games can offer.

However some emulation features still need an improvement and some are even not implemented yet.

Setting up PCSX2 guides

• For Windows version guide please see the page Setting up Windows version.
• For Linux version guide use Setting up Linux version link.
• Macintosh OS X users may find Setting up Mac version page useful.

Useful links

• Mac forums link