Game fans had a great deal to be excited about in Sony's PlayStation Experience a week. Psychonauts 2, for example! Many of the promising games which showed up on Sony's point are also making their way into the PC, but among the greatest announcements--or at least the one that I saw the most excitement around --wasn't about a brand new game. It concerned eight PS2 classics, including Dark Cloud and GTA III, being made playable on PS4... via emulation, at $15 a pop. But if you're like me and still have a whole lot of excellent PS2 games on a shelf or in a box in the rear of your closet, you can actually emulate those games in your PC with better pictures and more options than you can on a PS4. It's absolutely free, and it is really pretty easy.

Allow me to introduce you to PCSX2.

It is compatible with roughly 95% of their PS2's 2400+ game library. Sony's brand new PS4 emulation can conduct those old games in 1080p, however on a decent gaming PC it is possible to leave them at even higher resolutions such as 4K, downsampling them into the resolution of your screen for a better, clearer image. An aging or budget gaming rig needs to be able to deal with 1080p emulation for most games, no problem.At site ps2 iso games from Our Articles

If you are an old hand in PC emulation, you're likely as comfortable with PS2 emulator PCSX2 as you're with GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin. Both are free and legal--none of this code in the emulators themselves proceeds to Sony or even Nintendo--and have improved immensely over years of development, as a result of passionate communities. The great thing about PCSX2, however, and where it really differs from Dolphin, is you may easily play with your old copies of PlayStation 2 games simply by sticking the disks on your computer.

Assuming you still have a DVD drive (in case you do not, find a friend who can ), you can put in 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 have to think about disc read rates or swapping disks when you need to play a new game.

Seriously, it's not that hard

The remaining part of the process is pretty straightforward, honest (at least, unless something goes wrong). Download PCSX2 here and stick to a setup guide to set this up. The official PCSX2 guide is a terrific resource, but filled with an intimidating quantity of info you don't really need to know if you're only out to play games. Mostly all you need to know to get started is how to configure the images settings along with a gamepad.

Here is a terrific guide that lays out the fundamentals of configuring PCSX2 and its images settings without depriving you with advice. In addition, it touches on the sole complicated portion of preparing the emulator: the PS2 BIOS. Though the PCSX2 code is totally legal, Sony owns the code of their PS2 BIOS. That has not stopped the BIOS documents from being broadly distributed online, however it will mean the only free-and-clear legal method to obtain the essential BIOS files is to dump them from your PS2. PCSX2 delivers a forum and guide for how to ditch your BIOS.

Ironically, this all takes a little more work than spending $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. But that is the nature of the PC platform. With a little work, you can play just about anything.

And with a bit more work, it is possible to create the games better than they had been on the initial hardware. It becomes part of the fun: you can generally get a game to run without a lot of problem, but making it look as great as it can, and operate as easily as you can, is a gratifying vetting procedure. Any difficulty you encounter you can most likely solve with a simple Google search. That is the great part thing about emulation communities: they are filled with individuals devoted to producing these games operate.

With a tiny bit of time placed into PCSX2, you can leave the picture at 2x, 3x, 4x its original resolution (or higher!) , play a PS2 game using a DualShock or a Xbox controller, save to unlimited digital memory card use save states, borrow store files from other players, then use hacks to run games from widescreen. And you may take some fairly awesome screenshots.

Valkyrie Profile 2 having SweetFX shaders. Image via NeoGAF manhood Boulotaur2024.

God of War using ReShade and other filters applied. Image via NeoGAF penis irmas.

I will give you some of my own: screenshots I took Final Fantasy XII while enjoying the game earlier this season. What was blurry at 480i seems pretty damn awesome at 4K.