pouët.net

It looks like some progress has been made in making a PS2 emulator. None of the games play yet and it needs lots of work but there is probably potential to run PS2 demos soon, no?

Here's the url:

http://www.pcsx2.net/downloads.php

If anyone finds demos that do work please list them. Thanx!

A lot of demos "work" more or less properly, but it's horribly slow, the VU emulation is at best imperfect (and practicly non-existant in the latest public build)

And most of the GS plugins don't even get simple stuff like alphablending right.

(and yes i do realize that writting a ps2 emulator is a huge undertaking)

just don't expect it to be even remotely accurate.

For some demos that probably will work, have a look at http://www.thethirdcreation.net/archive.php

a small note, all the demos with multiple files try to load them from host: (which means you should put the datafiles, .irx'es in pcsx2's host dir)

Hmm,. I have a friend in Thessaloniki working on the project (he is Shadow, also the coder who originally started the PCSX (PS1) emulator), but I have to meet him since a lot. I knew there are some demos running but no games yet (and still no? I haven't heard anything, a good friend of mine who knows Shadow better tells me about emulator news). PS2 seems very heavy for modern PCs they say. I don't know if the other modern consoles (Dreamcast, Xbox, Dolphin) can be emulated fast, I only know that some people have started worked on them, but nothing playing games have been released the last time I checked..

Well, it will still probably be about 2 years till we'll see a PS2 emu for games. Mostly beacuse of the MIPS architecture used in PS2(it's like you were trying to make a Amiga PPC Emu for PC), and the Graphic Synthesizer+EE duo which is TOTALLY different in desing than the modern Graphic chips (like EE having direct access to the frame buffer, so no "Shaders" are needed, EE is a big "shading" processor in this case). All this has to be modified to match the i386 architecture. Respect to the ppl trying. IMHO, i would ditch to emu for i386, and try to emu PS2 for AMD64. Why Athlon64? Because of it's direct CPU->RAM and northbrdige-less ideas. It'll be MUCH easier to "fit" the PS2 into something like that instead to a slow CPU+FSB+GF4 (The PS2 equivalent of a system bus has something like 6.6GB thruoutput[AFAIR]). Anyway, good luck.

What im wondering about, XBOX emu would be pretty easy, it's just a P3+nForce with a M$ custom OS. It guess it would be easy to make a "software compatibility shell" that would just trick the executable to think it's in the XBOX hardware and is calling the XBOX DirectX, instead on Windows. Question is, how far apart is the XboX DirectX and the native M$ one?

movikun: the Xbox DirectX and the PC DirectX don't have ANYTHING to do with each other. For every "normal" DirectX8 call, there are three new ones which are easier, faster and more suitable for a console. The Xbox GPU has a few additional shader capabilities that normal DX8-style graphics hardware is lacking, The Xbox DirectX is also exposing all those features that are only in OpenGL on the PC, and most of all the whole hardware uses the same 64MB of memory, blurring the borders between system mem, frame buffers, textures, vertex data and all the stuff completely.

Let's say it should be possible to emulate the Xbox GPU by getting down to register/mem level and translating the stuff back to DirectX9 or OpenGL, but don't ever think that a direct Xbox->PC DirectX code translation is even remotely possible.

kb_: Is this mem management created by the Pseudo-OS that resides within the XboX or is this by hardware design? Btw, the Nvidia GPU AFAIK is a boosted GF3 (2Vertex Shaders and 2 Pixel Shaders whilst PC-GF3 is 1 of each). Except for that thanks for the clear-up kb.

movikun: unfortunately you're wrong about some things about the PS2, like e.g. EE having direct access to the framebuffer (in fact none of the processors have access to vram as a memory mapped location - you have to DMA the vram back to main memory if for some odd reason you need access to it), or no "shaders" being needed - the EE isnt used as a "vertex-shader" style device or for any t&l style ops in any half (or even quarter) decent ps2 engine.

anyway - for many reasons the ps2 is quite a big pain to emulate on a pc. its a pain enough to write a cross-platform engine for pc+ps2.

Isn't EE then used for image post-processing in many games (like the variable focus in MGS2?) I always thought that's done in EE. And if so, the bus must be very fast in order to get the current frame, process it and put it back. Is it even handled by EE then?

I dont remember MGS2 in detail atm, but alot of post-processing is done ( and should be done ) on GS. It also depends on what you mean with EE, the vector units alone is ofcourse the main power behind the rendering ( which could aswell be the reason for the effect you are talking about ). As for the emulator, the more tricks ppl get to do with the GS and the VIF the more pain for the emu writers, its like the neverending chase for the c64 emulation. bitch ass code for sync and all the vic bugs, and its just a 1Mhz machine.

no, the EE isnt used for that.
for example, depth of field on PS2 can be done by - taking the 24bit z buffer's middle 8 bits (corresponding to the green colour channel), shifting that into the alpha channel by making it pretend to be a 16 bit framebuffer of 2x the height. then blur the framebuffer by downsample+jitter, then use that alphachannel zbuffer to alphablend it back onto the framebuffer. all done locally on the GS. VU1 can be used for packet building to save some dma time and precious main memory, but its a gs effect..

and its stuff like that that makes the ps2 such a damn fun machine to work on =)
(not to mention, hard to emulate)

the bus is fast, yes - if you work it properly you can get 5-10mb of textures to the GS every frame. but transfers back from the GS to the EE run at 1/4 the speed. and then you got to process and send back. not very practical in a real situation. thats why, as with PCs these days, you do as much as possible on the GPU and dont try to read back.

anyway erm.. enough ps2 hardware geekiness. just get it and code on it, its fun.. =)

http://www.technology.scee.net/sceesite/files/articles/develop/SpecialEffects.pdf :)

jar. stop posting links from #ps2dev, damn warez0r ;)

Psx2 has made some good progress, but games are still not playable. I doubt we'll ever get a worthwhile PS2 emulator. Besides, the PS2 is already out of date now anyway.

There's quite a lot of ps2 boxes laying around here in shops among ps3 & xbox360.
Plus, a chipmod on a memory card (no soldering) appeared not too long ago that could incite some people to buy it and a console to start doing stuff on it again.

Also take a look at this:

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/28753/New-low-price-compact-PS2-to-arrive-in-2008

You'll never be able to run an uptodate platform emulator. Nintendo DS doesn't count if you consider it uptodate, and don't forget you're talking to ppl that work and watch stuff in 25 years old computers.

Oh... maybe Wii can be emulated too if you consider it an uptodate platform.

Is there any screenshot of that new PS2?

A lot of the PS2 demos work on my PS2 \o/

hithc: i saw some aggregate figures (linked on arstechnica iirc) showing that unit sales for ps2 are still higher than for ps3 ;)
and there's a tv ad for a kiddy game airing here in italy - ps2 only.

old thread is oooold

Guardian: Actually that doesn't mean anything. Keep topics together instead of following the Hugi way.

A question out of interest: The specs of the PS2 and the PSP have at some points some similarities (f.e. MIPS CPUs running at ~300 MHz). Would emulating one mean that half the emulation work is already done for the other?

A MIPS R5900 emulator is hardly half of a PS2 emulator, with all the other processors it has. I don't know how much the GPUs differ either. Even the GBA and DS which are probably a lot more similar have quite a number of differences.

hmm i thought that the GPU of the PS2 was from nvidia....
well that the CPU is MIPS... I heard that a 700 MHz MIPS CPU is as powerful as a Pentium 4 3 GHz CPU...

my point is: doesn't that mean for good emulation you need highend hardware?

Where'd you get that figure? Sounds like comparing apples to panda bears to me.

well i think it was with an sgi workstation...