PCSX2

PCSX2 is a extremely successful PS2 Emulator that is available on Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X. Made by part of the team that brought about PCSX-Reloaded for the PlayStation one. It manages to emulate the PS2 extremely well, being both fast, accurate and highly compatible. Boasting that over 94.94% of the PS2’s massive 2568 games are playable.

This is an amazing progress for any emulator, let alone one that tries to tackle one of the more complicated systems in the 6th generation of video game consoles. PCSX2’s success is in part thanks to it being the only real actively developed PS2 Emulator. Focused development, and over 14 years of active development time has allowed the emulator to mature extremely well. The team over the years has tackled a variety of different complicated issues with emulating the PS2. The early versions of PCSX2 focused on just getting into the PS2 loading screen and being able to actually emulate the complicated PlayStation 2 bios,

Recent versions have begun focusing on trying to bring highly accurate emulation without sacrificing the speed of the emulator, this is alongside trying to fix a lot of the edge cases that have cropped up while trying to emulate some games. While emulation might work perfectly for one, some games use certain tricks that require special coding to be able to emulate.

Its worth noting that PCSX2 makes use of the same plugin specification that was set out by the now long abandoned PSEmu Pro emulator for the PlayStation 1. This allows some features of the PS2 such as the graphics and audio to be handled externally, this does mean that compatibility can differ depending on what plugins you use.

Note: PCSX2 requires the PS2 Bios files to be able to run.