You need to have a Playstation2 BIOS to run the emulator.
Make sure that you update your version of Direct X to the November 2008 runtimes or later as the PCSX2 emulator won’t run without them. GPU – Nvidia GeForce 8600GT or better (or equivalent e.g.
dump your PS2 BIOS (since the emulator needs a valid copy of this to run)īefore you do anything else, check that your PC is capable of running the PCSX2 emulator at a decent frame rate – due to the complexities of the PS2 hardware you need a decent PC to run at a good speed.įrom the PCSX2 documentation the recommended setup is:.Here we will describe what you need to do to get the PCSX2 PS2 emulator working on your PC.
How To Install and Run the PCSX2 PS2 Emulator Now that you have read the review and seen what I have had to say – you would like to install it and have a go yourself, right? Right.
This is always of great benefit and a huge win when playing in the emulation game.Ĭompatibility 7/10 (and growing games list) It is relatively straight forward to use and is in active development so you should be able to find new versions and game fixes as time moves on and new releases are made. The PCSX2 is a great Playstation2 emulator with a lot of options.
Summary (5 out of 5)Īs long as you are configured correctly, running a game is as easy as running the emulator, inserting your game cd/dvd (using the cddvdrom plugin to point to your ISO backup if you don’t want to use the original disc), and clicking the ‘File->Run CD/DVD’ option from the menu.
More on this in the How To section of this article. 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. Other configuration options allow you to tweak various parameters and try hacks to get games that are having problems to run correctly. 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. Once tested you can hit the ‘Configure’ button to bring up a user interface to tweak the configuration for that particular plugin.
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. 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. The PCSX2 emulator uses a plugin system to handle the chores of mapping the PS2 hardware to the many different species of PC hardware. However this isn’t as complicated as it looks. Configuration of PCSX2Īt first there seems to be a huge array of options to configure on the PCSX2 emulator and it can be a little bit overwhelming. 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.