A very crafty developer has gotten a fork of the popular PCSX2 PS2 emulator running smoothly on an Xbox Series S.
YouTuber ModernVintageGamer breaks the feat down, explaining the successes and pitfalls of the Series S build in his latest video.
XBSX2 is the result of a substantial update to the PCSX2 program, allowing the PS2 emulator to be installed and run as a standalone Xbox app. The programmer behind the PCSX2 update was stenzek, the mind behind the excellent PS1 emulator DuckStation.
PCSX2 now features a full suite of graphics options. You can, for instance, upscale the resolution to 4K and beyond, natively in the app, and it won’t miss a beat. stenzek’s update added a full UI very similar to that of DuckStation, allowing players to pick through and tweak each emulated game for best performance. The thing is, stenzek has not, at the time of writing, released a complete version of PCSX2.
This doesn’t seem to have mattered so terribly to the emulation community, which set about creating branches of PCSX2 in hopes of creating emulators that could run on other platforms.
They succeeded. XBSX2 is a fork of the current PCSX2 build, capable of emulating PS2 games on Xbox Series S hardware. It runs as a UPP app in developer mode, and you could install it on your Series X or S console if you wanted to, and have access to developer mode. ModernRetroGamer believes you could probably get it working on an Xbox One or One X console too, though his expectation is that the app would run very slowly.
Obviously, what we’re talking about here is homebrew software, and far from an official app. You should think long and hard about messing around with your console as Xbox will not help you if you stuff up the installation.
For most of the PS2 games that ModernRetroGamer tests, everything seems to come up great. The frame rates are solid, the games run smoothly, and visuals look more crisp than they ever have before. Even games like Outrun, which previously gave him trouble, run beautifully when combined with the original RetroArch PS2 core. Rendering solutions patched into PCSX2 over the last year have also helped with issues like Burnout 3‘s missing skybox bug. Ridge Racer 5 still gave him trouble, however, with some serious texture issues on the game’s vehicle models. PCSX2 has an answer for this too, letting the play switch over to software rending and solving the problem.
Anyway, a remarkable piece of software engineering, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Source: ModernRetroGamer on YouTube
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