pcsx2 free download

 

Introduction

The PCSX2 emulator for the Sony Playstation 2 is the most complete and functional PS2 emulator out there. Each new revision and patch enables more games to be run and improves on the stability and speed of the emulator

The Official PCSX2 website is clear and easy to navigate, and the PCSX2 forumsreceive posts every day. This means that there is an active community which allows you to get help and which will drive further development. Getting support and having an actively developed emulator is extremely important if you wish to avoid frustration and disappointment with emulators.

The great thing about this emulator is that you can insert your PS2 game straight into your CD/DVD drive and the emulator will allow you to play the game on your PC!

This article will review this free ps2 emulator and then describe how to download, install, configure and run it on your PC.

NOTE: Remember, it is illegal to download BIOS or ROM images

Games on the PCSX2

Emulators are only as successful as the games that run on them. The PCSX2 website provides a compatibility list of games which shows the games supported by the emulator. The status of each game on the list and its compatibility is colour coded for easy reading:

• Green is playable
• Blue you can get in-game but there will be odd bugs and crashes
• Yellow means you can enter the menus of the game but usually not the game itself
• Orange means you will see some logos but not get in the game
• Red means nothing will happen at all.The PCSX2 documentation states that the compatibility list is a little out of date, so it is best, once you have everything set up, to just play the game and see if it works.

 

Configuration of PCSX2

At first there seems to be a huge array of options to configure on the PCSX2 emulator and it can be a little bit overwhelming. However this isn’t as complicated as it looks.

The PCSX2 emulator uses a plugin system to handle the chores of mapping the PS2 hardware to the many different species of PC hardware. 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.

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. Once tested you can hit the ‘Configure’ button to bring up a user interface to tweak the configuration for that particular plugin. 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.

Other configuration options allow you to tweak various parameters and try hacks to get games that are having problems to run correctly. 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.

More on this in the How To section of this article

 

Summary (5 out of 5)

As 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. That’s it.

The PCSX2 is a great Playstation2 emulator with a lot of options. 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.

This is always of great benefit and a huge win when playing in the emulation game.

Installation 10/10

Configuration 9/10

Compatibility 7/10 (and growing games list)

Overall 10/10

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. The how-to is on the next page.

How To Install and Run the PCSX2 PS2 Emulator

Here we will describe what you need to do to get the PCSX2 PS2 emulator working on your PC. In a nutshell:

• make sure your PC is up to the task
• dump your PS2 BIOS (since the emulator needs a valid copy of this to run)
• download and install the emulator
• run and configure the emulator
• run a game

PC Hardware Requirements

Before 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.

From the PCSX2 documentation the recommended setup is:

• XP/Vista 32bit/64bit
• CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo @3.2ghz or better
• GPU – Nvidia GeForce 8600GT or better (or equivalent e.g. ATI HD2600)
• 1GB RAM (2GB if on Vista)

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.

Dumping the Playstation2 BIOS

You need to have a Playstation2 BIOS to run the emulator. You must obtain this from your PS2 as the BIOS binary is copyright of Sony. This is perhaps the most technical thing you need to do get this emulator working.

The developers of the PCSX2 emulator provide a tool to allow you to dump the BIOS data from the Playstation2. Full instructions on how to do this are provided with the tool in the download.

Basically, you will need to either:

• connect to your PS2 via a network then run the tool you just downloaded (using Naplink or PS2Link) to dump the BIOS information, or
• you burn the downloaded tool onto a CD and run it on the PS2 itself, which will then dump the BIOS to a USB stick connected to the Playstation 2.

A quick web search will find many other ways to dump the PS2 BIOS, but these ways seem to be easiest and most reliable for PCSX2 emulator compatibility.

Important: While some standing legal decisions in America may create the impression that you are allowed to do this, the legality of using an emulator is dependent on how and where it is used, and could change based on future legal outcomes. It is solely the reader’s responsibility to establish the legality of these techniques in their legal jurisdiction. The author and publisher accept no responsibility for outcomes of following the advice in this article.

Getting and Running the PCSX2 Emulator

Configuration

Technical Setup Details For PCSX2

• Software Name: PCSX2 1.2.1 r5875
• File name: pcsx2-1.4.0-setup.exe
• Setup Full Size: 18 MB
• Latest Version Release Added On: 01st Jan 2019
• Developers:PCSX2
• License; Freeware

PCSX2 Free Download

Click on below button to start PCSX2 download. This is complete offline installer and full standalone setup for PCSX2. This will work for both 32 Bit and 64 Bit operating systems.

         

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