PS2 Emulator PCSX2 2.0 is out now and it's a huge upgrade

PCSX2 is a popular open source emulation for the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) and PCSX2 version 2.0 is now officially available with a great many changes and improvements.

There's so many changes in fact, that it's pretty difficult to give you a summary of what's new. Quite literally every part of the emulator has been improved.

For starters they've moved away from wxWidgets for the interface to the much more modern and cross-platform Qt. The developers said Qt brings with it a "slick appearance, more efficient UI backend, and provided the perfect opportunity to redo all our menus and widgets" with the addition of themes to personalise it to your liking.

Along with Qt also comes SDL2 now integrated, which gives vast improvements to controller mapping and works across different platforms. Thanks to that PCSX2 now has automatic controller mapping, so you're only a few button clicks away from being set up with your favourite gamepads.

Plugins were removed, but they've now added in Automatic Game Fixes. Using their own database of all the games, they ship pre-configured fixes to ensure games will run smoothly so you shouldn't need to go in and change various settings for different games. However, the UI also now has a section for per-game settings for any personalized changes and tweaks you do wish to make.

The list just keeps going on and on. PCSX2 even has its own Big Picture Mode now too:

There's also now support for RetroAchievements!

So many other additions like Vulkan API support, an upgraded patches system, various performance improvements, FFMPEG for video capture support, improved game compatibility, sound system improvements and much more.

See their lengthy blog post for all the details.