PCSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulator. Its purpose is to emulate the PS2's hardware, using a combination of MIPS CPU Interpreters, Recompilers and a Virtual Machine which manages hardware states and PS2 system memory. This allows you to play PS2 games on your PC, with many additional features and benefits.

The PCSX2 project has been running for more than twenty years. Past versions could only run a few public domain game demos, but newer versions can run most games at full speed, including popular titles such as Final Fantasy X and Devil May Cry 3. Visit the PCSX2 compatibility list to check the latest compatibility status of games (with more than 2500 titles tested).

PCSX2 allows you to play PS2 games on your PC, with many additional features and benefits. A few of those benefits include:

  • Custom resolutions and upscaling
  • Virtual and sharable memory cards
  • Save-states
  • Patching system
  • Internal recorder to achieve lossless quality at full speed

So how do I use it?

  • Download the version suited for you, for beginners, the full installer of the latest stable release is recommended.
  • Get the BIOS file from your PlayStation 2 console. This is not included with PCSX2 since it is a Sony copyright so you have to get it from your console.

Install PCSX2

  • Configure PCSX2. For beginners the Configuration Guide video and the Quick Start configuration guide should help you. For a detailed description of every single option you can always refer to the full guide.
  • Insert your PS2 game CD/DVD in your DVD rom. You can either run it directly from the disc or create an ISO image of your disc with a program like IMGburn for faster reads.
  • Enjoy!

Technical Notes

  • You need the Visual C++ 2019 x64 Redistributables to run PCSX2 on Windows.
  • Windows XP and Direct3D9 support was dropped after stable release 1.4.0.
  • Windows 7, Windows 8.0, and Windows 8.1 support was dropped after stable release 1.6.0.
  • 32-bit and wxWidgets support was dropped after stable release 1.6.0, with the wxWidgets code being removed completely on 25th December 2022.
  • Make sure to update your operating system and drivers to ensure you have the best experience possible. Having a newer GPU is also recommended so you have the latest supported drivers.
  • Because of copyright issues, and the complexity of trying to work around it, you need a BIOS dump extracted from a legitimately-owned PS2 console to use the emulator. For more information about the BIOS and how to get it from your console, visit this page.
  • PCSX2 uses two CPU cores for emulation by default. A third core can be used via the MTVU speed hack, which is compatible with most games. This can be a significant speedup on CPUs with 3+ cores, but it may be a slowdown on GS-limited games (or on CPUs with fewer than 2 cores). Software renderers will then additionally use however many rendering threads it is set to and will need higher core counts to run efficiently.
  • Requirements benchmarks are based on a statistic from the Passmark CPU bench marking software. When we say "STR", we are referring to Passmark's "Single Thread Rating" statistic. You can look up your CPU on Passmark's website for CPUs to see how it compares to PCSX2's requirements.
  • Vulkan requires an up-to-date GPU driver; old drivers may cause graphical problems.

What's New

This section covers games which went from not rendering anything to being playable, these issues are the most straight forward to fix, we debug these issues by monitoring all the abnormal activities occurring in the core leading to the game to crash and a solution is worked on to correct that behavior.

Preliminary PSX support has been added! Go try them out yourself, though do note that the PSX backward compatibility is still in its infant state and needs lots of work to be done before it reaches a perfect state.

Dropship United Peace Force went from not being able to get into main menu to being playable!

As it turns out, our VU branching subroutines had a longstanding bug which failed to account for a branch delay slot inside of another branch delay slot (this is as stupid as it sounds). In other words, the branch was being read as a NOP and got stuck running the wrong code until the game would crash. Never underestimate PS2 developers. If you think they won't do something that's forbidden in the manual, you're dead wrong.

All of the World Rally championship games are now playable!

This was fixed by properly handling branches in delay slots, the old behavior wasn't addressing this properly and the new behavior was shown to be accurate to the original hardware through tests ran from the EE PS2 testsuite.

Games which relied on game specific patches/hacks no longer need them anymore to boot!

Due to series of improvements in our core functions and recompilers, games like Jak X, Spongebob the Movie, Spongebob Battle for Bikini Bottom,The Incredibles, The Incredibles Rise of the Underminer, Soukou Kihei Armodyne, Garfield Saving Arlene, Tales of Fandom Vol. 2 are now playable without requiring the usage of any hacks or game specific patches.

This might not come of as a surprise to most users since these games were still playable in the older versions through the use of game specific patches, but handling this accurately would mean there are no potential side effects from the game specific patches and it brings us one step closer to the goal of emulation accuracy, which we strive to improve.

Graphics Synthesizer bug fixes

This section covers games which received an improvement in visual accuracy, these issues are mostly hard to debug due to the abnormal way of how the Graphics synthesizer handles most functions and the lack of any proper documentation regarding them, our GS developers however always try their best to fix them!

GSdx: Implementation of fixed TEX0 context for all renderers

Fixes texture corruption in games like Lupin: The Third and James Bond 007 Nightfire.

Read the entire changelog here.