Playing PS2 games with PCSX2
From Tutorials
So we started investigating if we could run our ps2 cd's from the computer. We already know all the PS1 games are good to go.. but the PS2 is a little bit more demanding. We have a number of DDR (Dance dance revolution) games and the dance pad controllers that come with them... Sure we could press Z, S, X, D on the keyboard and probably get pretty good at it... however that wasn't quite what I had in mind =) So on top of a working emulator we'll need some kind of USB device that will allow us to hook up a couple of PS2 controllers (dance pads) straight to the computer.
PCSX2 was the best PS2 emulator I came across. I grabbed the 0.9.4 Installer, and while I was there, found it very interesting that they also have the source code for the emulator available in linux ! Very cool. Anyways the installer is compressed with 7-zip which is another compression package like Arj, Zip, etc.. and can be downloaded from their homepage at http://www.7-zip.org/.
After unzipping the installer I expected to find a setup.exe or simular.. but none ! so okay I just ran pcsx2.exe directly (note pcsx2 requires XP Pro/Home with sp2, otherwise you'll have to run the pcsx2t.exe version). It modifies some setting that lets it access physical memory directly and you have to log out/ back in.
The emulator does not come with the PS2 bios. Several people have posted their PS2 bios files on the web. However note that the only legal way to obtain a ps2 bios is to dump it from your own PS2 ! After you have extracted the bios from your ps2, you get a nice little console you can launch your games from.
To configure the PS2 emulator, go into the Configure menu and switch the cd-rom driver to use P.E Op. S., for the Graphics driver I had to use the "no SSE2" one, and after all that it got my Wild Arms 3 game running straight from the cd rom, but on my system the video is choppy and slow. In fact too slow to really be enjoyable. However I have a video card that is several years old, and an older system as well.
For the playstation controllers, There are several converters available. The one I'll be ordering will probably be something like this one which looks promising.
