I’m a huge fan of the PlayStation 2 and its games. I liked the PlayStation fine, and it had a lot of games that remain classics, but the PS2’s weirdly named Emotion Engine brought games to life in a way never before seen at the time. I was blown away.
I’d had a bunch of games left over from the old days, and I’ve been buying more as I find them at game conventions and retro shops.
I do have my old PS/2 around… somewhere. My first one died, but I got a new, slim one to replace it. Everything was PS2 back then. I gamed on it. I played movies on it. I listened to CDs on it. Anyway I haven’t had it hooked up in forever, but I really wanted to play those old games.
I’ve been using PCSX2 for years, but it was always a real chore to get it working with some games. Demon Stone, the D&D game, was barely playable, the graphics glitched so badly. But it worked well enough.
When I swapped to my new computer, PCSX2 was one of the programs I brought over. So I got the latest version and… I was shocked by how professional it was.
Configuration was easy; I didn’t have to do anything at all. It booted right up.
The old PCSX2, the one I was used to, was very minimal. It had an unintuitive way of loading up games from the DVD drive (my new computer doesn’t even have one), or from a backup copy of the game on disk. A window with debugging information percolated away while the game was playing. There was a lot of fiddling involved with some games.
Playing a game with the new PCSX2, if you’ve ripped it with a utility such as ImgBurn, is as easy as clicking its portrait. (PCSX2 doesn’t come with the game portraits, but it can use a service to download them).
All the games I have tried, work. I’m only about halfway through the ripping process, but I don’t expect any sort of trouble. With the games this easy to play, I’ve been going through a lot of old and new favorites and it. Just. Works.
As with most emulators, it can simulate the old memory cards, and it has one button saving and loading in case you mess up and want to rethink something (although The Nightmare of Druaga will assume you slammed the reset button and yell at you for this). There’s input recording for macros; there’s screen recording, screen shots, cheats support, slow motion, double speed…. that slow motion will come in handy when I replay Defender of the Crown. I never did well with that back in the day.
Anyway. I’m really impressed with the latest iteration of PCSX2, and if you have any interest in playing some of the most memorable games of the 90s/early 2Ks, you could do worse.
PS1 emulation is a little easier; RetroArch has a few different emulators, and it offers a lot of the same things as PCSX2, if a little jankier. The version on Steam doesn’t seem to support the PS2, so… give it a shot.