True. It's awesome how far PS2 emu has come over the past few years.
That said, feel free to PM me. We can easily get those running off a PS2 HDD on a full digital setup for you. Can help you soft mod it. I have well over 100 PS2 ISOs spread between 2 drives. Good chance I have a chunk of your "must have" list. Even open to setting up a Mem Card, USB & HDD for you. Plug n play. IMO HDD is the only way to go on PS2. Because there's an easy, no hardware mod, fully digital solution that runs over component, I personally wouldn't let the PS2 alone determine the entire setup.
Making an emulation PC console-like
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Jagosaurus
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Re: Making an emulation PC console-like
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Re: Making an emulation PC console-like
I just found a few new recommendations for this question:
http://www.lakka.tv/
http://batocera-linux.xorhub.com/
Both are linux distributions that boot directly to a libretro/retroarch frontend after assessing the computer and it's hardware and automatically configuring a Retroarch setup to run all the games present.
I hear Recalbox also does this on an x86 computer.
Mostly these have been advertised as new Raspberry PI and Android gaming solutions, but they all have x86/x64 distributions as they're open-source and platform independent.
I've looked at several AIO distributions like these before, and I really just don't like the generalization these systems take to game emulation on different systems. Granted, that's why these were made. They are plug-and-play after all. They're built for a mobile CPU with a generic GPU. Any game pack will run; Just IMO not properly or well.
I don't think you'd be able to play any Windows games easily anymore, tho many steam releases are linux-friendly through wine. In those cases, just setting the front-end up with cmd batch files would allow them to run.
For those reasons, I'm rolling my own systems for PC @ 15Khz and Raspberry Pi. I have different solutions for 4x3, 3x4 (vertical Like Pacman & Centipede and all the shmups). I also have a solution for HD CRT (actually only old PC monitors) - You can get 15khz games running with scanlines and with no screen tearing (vsync) in both Sd (240p) by increasing the clock speed to 120 instead of 60 for those low-resolution modes; The scanlines don't look quite right, but IMO they're better than line-doubling (in that case 200p and 240p games would show at 400p & 480p like DOS would show them back in the day. The other benefit is getting true Enhanced Definition (480p) that would support PC gaming in the 90s as well as the 5th and 6th generation consoles.
The main thing I'm concerning myself with is getting games running accurately without any lag. I'm not good at playing twitch games by any measure, but I found that the reason I sucked before was because I wasn't playing on hardware that interfaced with the screen properly (direct-view - which only CRTs can achieve). In a proper emulation setup, the games have less than 1 frame of lag between when you press a button and when the character on the display responds.
A PC is much harder to make 0-lag responsive.
After that, I found that the problem with the emulated games is usually the display. Any off-the-shelf LCD or Plasma will either reject or process a 15khz signal. Most of them, even in "Game Mode" do add a few frames of delay while processing you picture. The solution most people turn to is a scaler. That's 1 more frame of lag at least, plus the cost ~ $400 if you wanna do it right for one system; You need to adjust the setting per-system if you want to experience your games right through a scaler. There's not yet a solution for competition gaming (well there is, but the tests are not in yet in early 2019 for those 3-figure LCDs).
http://www.lakka.tv/
http://batocera-linux.xorhub.com/
Both are linux distributions that boot directly to a libretro/retroarch frontend after assessing the computer and it's hardware and automatically configuring a Retroarch setup to run all the games present.
I hear Recalbox also does this on an x86 computer.
Mostly these have been advertised as new Raspberry PI and Android gaming solutions, but they all have x86/x64 distributions as they're open-source and platform independent.
I've looked at several AIO distributions like these before, and I really just don't like the generalization these systems take to game emulation on different systems. Granted, that's why these were made. They are plug-and-play after all. They're built for a mobile CPU with a generic GPU. Any game pack will run; Just IMO not properly or well.
I don't think you'd be able to play any Windows games easily anymore, tho many steam releases are linux-friendly through wine. In those cases, just setting the front-end up with cmd batch files would allow them to run.
For those reasons, I'm rolling my own systems for PC @ 15Khz and Raspberry Pi. I have different solutions for 4x3, 3x4 (vertical Like Pacman & Centipede and all the shmups). I also have a solution for HD CRT (actually only old PC monitors) - You can get 15khz games running with scanlines and with no screen tearing (vsync) in both Sd (240p) by increasing the clock speed to 120 instead of 60 for those low-resolution modes; The scanlines don't look quite right, but IMO they're better than line-doubling (in that case 200p and 240p games would show at 400p & 480p like DOS would show them back in the day. The other benefit is getting true Enhanced Definition (480p) that would support PC gaming in the 90s as well as the 5th and 6th generation consoles.
The main thing I'm concerning myself with is getting games running accurately without any lag. I'm not good at playing twitch games by any measure, but I found that the reason I sucked before was because I wasn't playing on hardware that interfaced with the screen properly (direct-view - which only CRTs can achieve). In a proper emulation setup, the games have less than 1 frame of lag between when you press a button and when the character on the display responds.
A PC is much harder to make 0-lag responsive.
After that, I found that the problem with the emulated games is usually the display. Any off-the-shelf LCD or Plasma will either reject or process a 15khz signal. Most of them, even in "Game Mode" do add a few frames of delay while processing you picture. The solution most people turn to is a scaler. That's 1 more frame of lag at least, plus the cost ~ $400 if you wanna do it right for one system; You need to adjust the setting per-system if you want to experience your games right through a scaler. There's not yet a solution for competition gaming (well there is, but the tests are not in yet in early 2019 for those 3-figure LCDs).
