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 speed and good visuals (often even better than the original PS2 has ever archived).

Up until now the program has plugin architecture making it possible to expand it's capabilities by attaching additinal plugins. Although those plugins are very numbered and are unlikely to increase their quantity in the near future but the the plugin approach is still has it's positive moments (it's possible to use newly updated plugins without changing the version of the main program or vice versa). As of late 2009 the program only supports x86 architecture and can only efficiently use 2 cores on multicore CPUs (1 core is used for the main emulation purposes and the other is for plugins' uses like rendering graphics, output sounds or PAD works). However the increase of number of useful cores can happen in the future.