Thursday, January 19, 2012

The PS2 Lives On


When I first discovered emulators in high school I absolutely lost my mind. It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen and ever since then I've felt really good about all that stuff. It might not be the most legal thing in the world if you're downloading games you don't own but it seems that emulating up NES or Master System games is a harmless activity.

Anyway, recently I was reminded of the PCSX2 emulator. I tried it way back when it first came out and immediately stopped. It was horrible! The compatibility with games was measly and the games that did run were buggy, slow as sloth messes. Shortly after that I deleted the program and quickly wiped it from my mind.

It's been some years since then though so I thought it was time to try again. The emulator is much harder to set up than most. If you can manage it though then it will be revealed that the PCSX2 emulator has finally grown up. Yes, there's still many incompatible games, but there are a great deal more that do work then don't. If you trust their compatibility guide, at least 1668 known games (this includes different regions of the same games) are completely playable. The best thing about the emulator though is that it can make PS2 games look and perform better than they ever could on actual systems.

I've only tried a few games so far but they both run well. I'm giving the emulator its biggest test by playing through Final Fantasy X. There has been one goofy issue though. During boss fights it seems one character in the party will always be facing away from the enemy. Who knows what causes that, but it's silly to see.

Beyond that, I've resumed ripping my PS2 games to an external drive. Initially that project was started to combat the eventual death of my discs. Sure, I might be amazing with disc care, but it's nice to have some peace of mind as well. What makes this useful though is that PCSX2 works best with disc images rather than running through the disc drive. So, if all my games get digitized I'll have quick and easy access to my PS2 library whenever. I can't wait!

2 comments:

Bryan Ochalla said...

Huh, I completely forgot about this emulator, too. Of course, my desktop PC isn't anywhere near powerful enough to run it, so I probably won't be able to make use of it for some time. Still, it's nice to hear it's improving!

Unknown said...

PS2 is the well featured game console for play the games. In this game console mostly i play the Final Fantasy X. It is one of the most popular game of PS2.
r4 ds lite

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