Emulator PS2

PCSX2

Description :

PCSX2 is an open-source PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulator for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X operating systems. In its latest stable release, many PS2 games are playable, and several games have full functionality. The main bottleneck in PS2 emulation is emulating the multi-processor PS2 on a PC x86 architecture. Although each CPU can be emulated well, accurately synchronizing the CPUs is very difficult.
PCSX2, like its predecessor project PCSX, is based on a plug-in architecture, separating several functions from the core emulator. These are the graphics, audio, input controls, CD/DVD drive, and USB and FireWire (i.LINK) ports. Different plug-ins may produce different results in both compatibility and performance. Additionally, PCSX2 requires a copy of the PS2 BIOS, which is not available for download from the developers, due to the copyright concerns and legal issues associated with it. The emulator is incompatible with PlayStation games.

Development :

Development of PCSX2 began in around 2001 by Linuzappz and Shadow, who were coders for the PlayStation emulator, PCSX. Other coders later joined the team and they eventually managed to get simple PlayStation 2 homebrew software and games to run. Many revisions later and with lots of plug-in development, the PCSX2 team managed to get some games into loading screen, and even in-game footage for other games. The team started working on emulating the PlayStation 2's BIOS, which proved to be extremely difficult to accomplish. Once the team got the BIOS to run, it was slow and graphically distorted. After that was accomplished, the team started to focus on implementing missing parts of the emulator and replacing hacks with correct emulation as they started to understand those areas. The implementation of the first recompiler was made by Goldfinger and improved speed greatly compared to the older interpreter, which was slow by design. These improvements slowly increased the speed and compatibility of PCSX2. Zerofrog later joined the team and developed the ZeroGS and ZeroSPU2 plug-ins. He also rewrote the VU and EE recompilers, which lead to huge speed boosts in version 0.9.1, released July 2006.
During summer 2007, GiGaHeRz managed to get the Netplay working, an area no other member of the PCSX2 team dared to venture into. In 2008 Zerofrog left the team and minor changes were made to the emulator by the two remaining coders, Refraction and Saquib, to keep the project alive. After the release of 0.9.4 in November 2007, the GSdx plug-in underwent significant changes by Gabest which improved its speed. These changes included the addition of the Direct3D 10 renderer, which solved the issue of clipping surfaces (which was caused by the limitations of Direct3D 9) and improved the caching methods of the emulator, and a rewrite of the entire software renderer that allowed it to run on multiple CPU threads, closing the performance gap between the hardware and the software renderer when running the software renderer on a highly threaded CPU such as the Core i7.
In February 2009, new coders were enlisted to work on the emulator. PCSX2 0.9.8 was released in May 2011 and featured an overhauled GUI written with wxWidgets which improved compatibility for Linux and newer Windows operating systems, the addition of a new VU compiler known as microVU0 in order to bring better compatibility to the legacy SuperVU compiler, a memory card editor, an overhaul of the SPU2-X audio plug-in allowing for games like Burnout 3 to run for the first time on PCSX2, and numerous other improvements and bugfixes. The SPU2-X plug-in was updated in June 2011 to improve emulation of the PS2's audio.




Speed Misconception :

A common misconception regarding PCSX2 is that a processor with a relatively high clock speed, such as a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP (the former with clock speeds as high as 3.8 GHz), should easily be able to emulate PS2 games at full speed. The PS2 has several processing units including a MIPS R5900 chip, MIPS R3000A chip, two custom vector units, and graphics chip (Graphics Synthesizer). With the exception of the MIPS R5900 (clocked at 294.912 MHz) and the MIPS R3000A (clocked at 36.864 MHz, selectable to 33.8688 MHz for PlayStation (1) emulation), all other chips run at the bus speed of 147 MHz. There are several reasons which make emulation of the PS2 on a PC extremely difficult. Architectural differences between an x86-based PC and the PS2 are substantial; emulating multiple chips running in parallel on a single-core processor is quite complex. Taking advantage of dual core processors on PCs is even harder due to the tight synchronization between the PS2 chips. The development team provides a blog, explaining technical details of emulating the PS2.
Unlike PC games, PS2 games must be kept at a constant frame-rate to avoid the game running too fast or slow. This is typically linked in with the refresh rate of the television or monitor; for NTSC games, this is 59.94 frames per second, and 50 for PAL. These can be changed in the pcsx2_vm.ini file; a lower value will allow some games to run at full speed on lower-end computers, but the animation will not be as smooth. The GS menu of newer versions includes a menu to either change the frame-limiter to a lower value to make games run in slow-motion, or higher to speed them up, known as "turbo" mode. The frame-limiter can also be disabled entirely to either perform benchmark tests or speed up through certain game menus. These can all be activated in game using hotkeys.

Plug-ins :

Several plug-ins are currently being further developed, for performance and compatibility enhancements.

Requirement :

Hardware requirements are very game-dependant although it must be noted that the bottleneck of this emulator in most cases is the CPU rather than than the GPU (video card):basically, a faster CPU should net you better PCSX2 performance. Some games however can be slowed down because of unoptimized GFX code or even because of weak GPU cards (for example Final Fantasy XII is said to use your GPU fully). Intel CPUs perform better than AMD ones although both can run the emulator. Even though clock speed is one of the main factors for smooth PCSX2 emulation, clock speed is not the determining meter of success with PCSX2. Newer CPUs generally tend to perform better than the old ones using the same frequency, e.g, a 2.4 GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 processor will generally outperform a 3.2 GHz dual-core Intel Pentium D processor. Even though the Pentium D is clocked higher, the Core 2 Duo is faster due to the Core microarchitecture of the Core 2 Duo being more efficient than the Netburst of microarchitecture of the Pentium D.

Obtaining BIOS :

Dumping the BIOS from the Playstation 2 console is definitely the most difficult step in setting up PCSX2. While it can be downloaded from various sources around the internet, the BIOS is copyrighted by Sony, and acquiring it by any means other than from one's PS2 console is illegal. Obtaining the BIOS files requires that a dumping software such as Free McBoot be installed on the Playstation 2 itself, and then using a BIOS dumper (supplied by the PCSX2 team) stored on a flash drive to copy the files. At this point, the BIOS can be uploaded to the user's PC and used in PCSX2.

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