RetroArch will soon get the PlayStation 2 emulator PCSX2

Poor Play, it's so unloved.

Guess the question is, can the Raspberry Pi 4 handle PS2 games? I may have to take my old tower and use it as a games console... been tempted to do it anyhow..

Guess the question is, can the Raspberry Pi 4 handle PS2 games? I may have to take my old tower and use it as a games console... been tempted to do it anyhow..

I'd say... probably?

I've been running PS2 emulators many years ago (when they were still eating more performance, too) and if you assume that the best Pi now has about the power of PCs back then. Definitely possible.

Guess the question is, can the Raspberry Pi 4 handle PS2 games? I may have to take my old tower and use it as a games console... been tempted to do it anyhow..

I'd be surprised (and delighted) if it was playable. My low-end amd hardware can just about run GT2 with some slowdowns, and that's considerably more capable than a pi 4. It'd be good to hear your experience. If it runs smoothly, I'll be buying a pi 4!

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.


Last edited by TheLinuxPleb on 3 November 2020 at 3:28 pm UTC

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Hopefully the future Pi5 will be able to run at least some PS2 games but the Pi4... I can't see how it could be able to reasonably run any of them.

They did just release the pi 400 that you can overclock quite nicely as it has a massive heat spreader stuck to it inside the keyboard. I'll probably pick one of those up eventually.

any words if the release of retroarch on steam is approaching?

I'm still waiting for the updated Dwarf Fortress too.

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

It was actually only recently ported to 64bit, and porting to ARM or other platforms seems to be a thorny issue: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/2915

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Unfornately is not that easy. Until today, there isnt a PCSX2 port for ARM. The only that i know is the Damon PS2 that is available on Android


Last edited by WJMazepas on 4 November 2020 at 12:18 pm UTC

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Unfornately is not that easy. Until today, there isnt a PCSX2 port for ARM until today. The only that i know is the Damon PS2 that is available on Android

Interesting.
On that note, I was just wondering why we haven't ever seen any of the higher end SoC makers release SBCs out there like the Pi. I mean some of the cell phones are getting crazy performance, and would make excellent mini computers. Granted I know most of them use closed source blobs for graphics, but the performance of them is pretty nice. I mean Apple thinks it is time, why not Qualcomm?

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Unfornately is not that easy. Until today, there isnt a PCSX2 port for ARM until today. The only that i know is the Damon PS2 that is available on Android

I remember a post in forum from Gregory Henault explaining far and large why it was not such a good idea / hard if you want to search.

I can add to it: first you clearly don't just need to recompile, since PCSX2 is a JIT, so porting to ARM means rewriting a code generator for it. Since PCSX2 was never thought with the idea of having a host agnostic architecture or just multiple backends for hosts, even the x64 port is non trivial (and even then, it would be simpler, not trivial). Adding ARM support would be far worst.
Indeed, ARM is not a very good host for JITs, its ISA is not very efficient in term of icache footprint (like many RISCs) and will usually cause a lot of inflation in term of generated host code size VS target(PS2 here) code size - on the opposite, x64 or x86 thx to being very footprint efficient will result to a lower code inflation, even deflation on some blocks.

Now on the PS2 arch itself: emulating it is hard, the arch is really not standard, not at all: you have 3 cores, not two of them being the same. Parallelizing it is very hard too, since synchronization between cores is very exotic (even modern SMP parallel simulation is non trivial btw, see Qemu's MT TCG effort). As such, you mostly need to resort to 1/ tricks to still make it more parallel (hurts precision) and 2/ High single core performance to soak having to emulate two cores on one thread still. Add to that the fucked up version of floating points in PS2 (which forces you to clamp since it is 100% exotic) and you have a recipe for a pretty bad experience on ARM hosts - and even a bumpy ride on x64 until not so long ago.
And of course, when I talk about parrallelization, I only talk about one target core, one host thread. Mutli host thread for one target core can be used for defered optimization, but it's wayyyy harder to do. As such you can count that you will need at least 20 times the target raw performance here to get anywhere close a reasonable emulation, on one core (very very raw estimation would be 4GHz per core, at least 4 cores for the EE+2VUs+the graphics core- just to give an idea, Hz are not the precise/right way to express that). Raspi is far from that target...

TLDR, ps2 emulation is not simple, even if it is quite old. Don't expect to have a pleasant ride on a raspi anytime soon.

A solution would be to go the same road as PS3 emulation, that is, some kind of Static Binary Translation pass, which could considerably reduce the overhead - particularly for the floating point problem I'd expect. But that's no picnic either.

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Unfornately is not that easy. Until today, there isnt a PCSX2 port for ARM until today. The only that i know is the Damon PS2 that is available on Android

Interesting.
On that note, I was just wondering why we haven't ever seen any of the higher end SoC makers release SBCs out there like the Pi. I mean some of the cell phones are getting crazy performance, and would make excellent mini computers. Granted I know most of them use closed source blobs for graphics, but the performance of them is pretty nice. I mean Apple thinks it is time, why not Qualcomm?

They probably dont release due to costs. The public that needs a high performance SBC is really small and is willing to pay a lot for it, so you see cases like the Jetson Xavier which is pretty expensive.
At this price, just makes more sense to buy a small PC

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Unfornately is not that easy. Until today, there isnt a PCSX2 port for ARM until today. The only that i know is the Damon PS2 that is available on Android

Interesting.
On that note, I was just wondering why we haven't ever seen any of the higher end SoC makers release SBCs out there like the Pi. I mean some of the cell phones are getting crazy performance, and would make excellent mini computers. Granted I know most of them use closed source blobs for graphics, but the performance of them is pretty nice. I mean Apple thinks it is time, why not Qualcomm?

They probably dont release due to costs. The public that needs a high performance SBC is really small and is willing to pay a lot for it, so you see cases like the Jetson Xavier which is pretty expensive.
At this price, just makes more sense to buy a small PC

That's a valid point, which Apple knows their fans will pay that expensive price anyhow for what amounts to a phone in a laptop.

PCSX2 for me has always had huge performance discrepancies between the windows and linux versions. The game on which I most often test, Black, is unplayable under linux, but fine under Windows. Could be some sort of driver issue as running PCSX2 under wine results in the same poor performance as the native port, though in every other application I've ran through wine I have not notices OpenGL performance suffer really at all compared to running the app natively under Windows.

I hope the retroarch port doesn't have this issue, I dual boot for five specific applications, and one of them is PCSX2

PCSX2 for me has always had huge performance discrepancies between the windows and linux versions. The game on which I most often test, Black, is unplayable under linux, but fine under Windows. Could be some sort of driver issue as running PCSX2 under wine results in the same poor performance as the native port, though in every other application I've ran through wine I have not notices OpenGL performance suffer really at all compared to running the app natively under Windows.

I hope the retroarch port doesn't have this issue, I dual boot for five specific applications, and one of them is PCSX2

Yeah, I experienced the same issue with the PS3 emulation as well. Part of this is due to some of the plugin differences. The DirectX one seems to be much more advanced than the OpenGL one.

Yeah, I experienced the same issue with the PS3 emulation as well. Part of this is due to some of the plugin differences. The DirectX one seems to be much more advanced than the OpenGL one.

The Ubuntu focal repository has a 1.5 build that, according to some on github, for whatever reason has worse performance than it really should, and worse than even 1.4 builds.
I recently tried 1.6 and 1.7 builds of PCSX2 and it gave substantially better performance than what I was used to, could even fast forward in games that used to barely run. It was far more of a pain than it should've been to get those later builds working on my system and I nearly entirely gave up. The official PCSX2 PPA only has daily git builds, and they're quite unstable, and on my system not able to get into a game before hitting a segfault, couldn't compile PCSX2 myself due to it using a web of old dependencies that would've ruined my install (Probably could've set up a container, but that came off as too much of a pain in my mind, was at the end of my rope at that point already), when I did finally discover builds of the emulator that worked, well they didn't actually work, they just failed in a different but fixable way, for whatever reason PCSX2 1.6 and onward just hates the AMDGPU Pro drivers and can't find an OpenGL compatible GPU with them installed. While I needed the Pro drivers to prevent Blender from crashing when using the Eevee renderer I eventually gave in and just removed them, this wasn't the first time those drivers gave me this kind of issue so whatever, good riddance.
I've been picking away at this issue off and on for two weeks now and dabbled with it at points much earlier, it's been driving me crazy. Seems like PCSX2 is a bit of a mess and needs some major refactoring or something, I don't know, maybe I just need to switch to a rolling distro. Either way I can't wait for the libretro core to come out and hopefully put all these efforts of mine to waste.

Is there going to be any ARM version? I think i saw somewhere that this is x86 only.

Pretty sure PCSX2 is all open source, so in theory just needs a recompile. I don't think it's one of those emulators that are coded in a way they won't even work on 64bit systems.

Hopefully the future Pi5 will be able to run at least some PS2 games but the Pi4... I can't see how it could be able to reasonably run any of them.

They did just release the pi 400 that you can overclock quite nicely as it has a massive heat spreader stuck to it inside the keyboard. I'll probably pick one of those up eventually.

Judging from how the regular Pi 4B 4GB model handles Lakka with any shader enabled, I doubt even the 400 with an overclock would be able to handle PCSX2, Though I will admit that pi 400 would be an absolute must have for emulating ZX Spectrum or Commodore machines.

any words if the release of retroarch on steam is approaching?

I highly doubt you'll see RetroArch on Steam, due to legality concerns behind the acquisition of game and bios ROMs. Not something that Valve would want to get involved with, I'm sure.

Also, kind of curious why you'd want this on Steam? It's already freely available through repo's on linux so I feel like it'd be kinda unnecessary to put *another* game launcher in the way of your.. game launcher.

I highly doubt you'll see RetroArch on Steam, due to legality concerns behind the acquisition of game and bios ROMs. Not something that Valve would want to get involved with, I'm sure.

Nothing about emulation itself is legally concerning.
As you say, it is about the roms (bios & games) - none of which will be offered via Steam or RetroArch.


Now, naturally, I and every other person that ever used an emulator owns 100% of emulated games & systems and made all copies of all ROMs themselves.
And it will likely remain that way until the day all these games become old enough to have their copyright expired.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 5 December 2020 at 5:14 pm UTC

I highly doubt you'll see RetroArch on Steam, due to legality concerns behind the acquisition of game and bios ROMs. Not something that Valve would want to get involved with, I'm sure.

Nothing about emulation itself is legally concerning.
As you say, it is about the roms (bios & games) - none of which will be offered via Steam or RetroArch.


Now, naturally, I and every other person that ever used an emulator owns 100% of emulated games & systems and made all copies of all ROMs themselves.
And it will likely remain that way until the day all these games become old enough to have their copyright expired.

Yeah, I mean it isn't technically illegal to sell flash carts, but they can only legally provide some home brew games that they have bsen given permission to distribute.
Yet, I see TONS of people selling pre-configured sd cards, and hard drives filled with ROMs, not sure how any of that is legal, but it does make a convenient way for those who are too lazy, or don't have the knowledge to enjoy some old gaming.