Playstation 2 Emulator Review and How To: the PCSX2 emulator

The PCSX2 emulator for the Sony Playstation 2 is the most complete and functional PS2 emulator out there. Each new revision and patch enables more games to be run and improves on the stability and speed of the emulator.

The Official PCSX2 website is clear and easy to navigate, and the PCSX2 forums receive posts every day. This means that there is an active community which allows you to get help and which will drive further development. Getting support and having an actively developed emulator is extremely important if you wish to avoid frustration and disappointment with emulators.

The great thing about this emulator is that you can insert your PS2 game straight into your CD/DVD drive and the emulator will allow you to play the game on your PC!

This article will review this free ps2 emulator and then describe how to download, install, configure and run it on your PC.

NOTE: Remember, it is illegal to download BIOS or ROM images.

 Emulators are only as successful as the games that run on them. The PCSX2 website provides a compatibility list of games which shows the games supported by the emulator. The status of each game on the list and its compatibility is colour coded for easy reading:

• Green is playable
• Blue you can get in-game but there will be odd bugs and crashes
• Yellow means you can enter the menus of the game but usually not the game itself
• Orange means you will see some logos but not get in the game
• Red means nothing will happen at all.

The PCSX2 documentation states that the compatibility list is a little out of date, so it is best, once you have everything set up, to just play the game and see if it works.

 At first there seems to be a huge array of options to configure on the PCSX2 emulator and it can be a little bit overwhelming. However this isn't as complicated as it looks.

The PCSX2 emulator uses a plugin system to handle the chores of mapping the PS2 hardware to the many different species of PC hardware. The plugin system provides flexibility to the emulator, compartmentalizes the complexities and enables the emulator to work on as broad a range of PC hardware as possible.

In the Configuration interface simply select your plugin from the dropdown list and hit the 'Test' button – it will let you know if the plugin doesn't think it can run. Once tested you can hit the 'Configure' button to bring up a user interface to tweak the configuration for that particular plugin. You will probably need to do this later on when you are tweaking the settings to try to get a particular game to work correctly.

Other configuration options allow you to tweak various parameters and try hacks to get games that are having problems to run correctly. You can organise your memory cards (emulated), tweak options on your CPU, apply game patches, apply special game fixes, and allow speed hacks which should speed emulation up for most games.

More on this in the How To section of this article.