Game enthusiasts had a good deal to be excited about at Sony’s PlayStation Experience final week. Psychonauts 2, for instance! Many of the promising games which showed up on Sony’s stage will also be making their way to the PC, however, one of the greatest announcements–at least the one I saw that the most excitement about–wasn’t about a brand new game. It concerned eight PS2 classics, including Dark Cloud and GTA III, being made working on PS4… through emulation, at $15 a popup. But if you are like me and have a whole bunch of amazing PS2 games on a shelf or in a box in the back of your cupboard, you can really emulate those games on your own PC with better images and more choices than you can on a PS4. It’s absolutely free, and it’s really pretty straightforward.

Allow me to present you to PCSX2.

It is compatible with about 95 percent of their PS2’s 2400+ sport library. Sony’s brand new PS4 emulation can run those old games in 1080p, however on a good gaming PC you’re able to leave them at even higher resolutions like 4K, downsampling them to the resolution of your monitor for a much better, clearer picture. Even an aging or budget gaming rig should be in a position to manage 1080p emulation for the majority of matches, no problem.by link play station 2 isos website

If you’re an old hand at PC emulation, you are probably as comfortable with PS2 emulator PCSX2 because you’re with GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin. Both are legal and free –not one of this code in the emulators themselves belongs to Sony or Nintendo–and have improved immensely over years of growth, as a result of passionate communities. The great thing about PCSX2, however, and in which it really comes from Dolphin, is you can easily play your old copies of PlayStation 2 games by simply sticking the disks in your computer.

Assuming you still have a DVD drive (if you do not, find a friend who does), you can plop a PS2 disc into the drive and then emulate it straight from the disc. I would recommend ripping it into an ISO with a free program like ImgBurn so you don’t need to worry about disk read rates or swapping discs when you want to play a new game.

Seriously, it is not that tough

Download PCSX2 here and adhere to a configuration manual to set this up. The official PCSX2 guide is a excellent resource, but filled with an intimidating amount of information you do not really have to know if you’re only out to play games. Mostly all you want to know to get started is how to configure the graphics settings along with a gamepad.

Here is a wonderful guide that sets out the principles of configuring PCSX2 and its own images settings without depriving you with advice. Additionally, it touches on the one complex portion of preparing the emulator: the PS2 BIOS. While the PCSX2 code is totally legal, Sony owns the code of this PS2 BIOS. That hasn’t stopped the BIOS documents from being widely distributed online, however it will mean the sole free-and-clear legal way to acquire the essential BIOS files is to dump them out of your own PS2. PCSX2 offers a forum and manual for how to ditch your BIOS.

Admittedly, this takes a little more work than paying $15 into re-buy a PS2 game on your PS4, which you will inevitably be asked to re-buy on the PlayStation 6 or 5. With just a little work, you are able to perform almost anything.

And with a little more work, you can make the games much better than they had been on the original hardware. It becomes a part of the fun: you can generally get a game to run without too much trouble, but making it seem as good as it may, and run as smoothly as possible, is a gratifying tinkering process. Any problem you experience you can most likely solve with a simple Google search. That’s the wonderful part thing about emulation communities: they are filled with individuals dedicated to creating these games run.

With just a small time set into PCSX2, you can leave the image at 2x, 3x, 4x its original resolution (or greater!) , play a PS2 game with a DualShock or an Xbox controller, listen to infinite digital memory card or use save nations, borrow save files from other players, then use hacks to conduct games in widescreen. And you can take some pretty amazing screenshots.

Valkyrie Profile 2 using SweetFX shaders. Picture via NeoGAF manhood Boulotaur2024.

God of War using ReShade along with other filters employed. Image via NeoGAF penis irmas.

I’ll give you a few of my own: screenshots I took of Final Fantasy XII while enjoying the game earlier this season. What was fuzzy at 480i looks pretty damn amazing in 4K.