PCSX2: emulating the playstation 2

[Erik_Twice]

Well, I decided to give it a shot. I've been tinkering with settings for the last hour. I can play Persona 3 FES at around 40fps which feels pretty sluggish. Disgaea usually stays right around 60fps, which is playable, but the music skips a lot and the screen has little spasms every now and again. .

Stop. There's a point where the game freezes on a boss if any character but MC attack. So unless you use cheats the game in unwinnale or grind-tastic.

My friends and I tried this emulator. We don't like it, most games are buggy or run very poorly. I think part of the problem is that once a game is "playable" they stop polishing it even if playable has problems like P3 with the choppy audio and unwinnable battles.

[neilencio]

I agree with Mozgus, PCSX2 seems to be clockspeed and L2 cache dependent and would not benefit much from multiple cores. I used to have a C2D E4300 (1.8 ghz per core, 1mb l2 cache) paired with a 9500 GT and DBZ Budokai 3 ran like shit.

I recently bought a new PC with a DC Wolfdale E5200 (2.5 ghz per core, 2mb l2 cache) and DBZ Budokai 3 still ran like shit, but in a less shitty way. Then I OCed the e5200 to 3 ghz and got above 60FPS. I've even seen youtube videos where God of War runs fullspeed on an e5200 OCed to 4ghz, but I can't seem to get that much OC on stock cooling, or without locking up upon boot.

But screw that. I don't want to risk frying my processor just for emulating a few PS2 games, when a 2nd hand modded PS2 these days cost less than a replacement processor+mobo.

[lisalover1]

I have a decent laptop, Dual-Core 2 GHz and a good graphics card, and I can run even advanced games like Persona 4 at around 55 FPS, with the only major glitch being very slow sound.

[neilencio]

This is odd, when I switched to the 64 bit edition of Windows XP, the performance of PCSX2 significantly improved, to the point where games that I can't run fullspeed before without overclocking and enabling all the speedhacks, now requires me to enable the framelimiter so that I can cap the fps to 60 (I get around 64 to 70fps) without the limiter.

The games I play are not demanding though. Just regular cellshaded fighters like Dragonball Infinite World, Dragonball Tenkaichi Budokai 3, Naruto Ultimate Ninja 3, and Wwe smackdown VS Raw 2009, which isn't cel shaded but doesn't have a lot of things going on at the same time. (The situation would be different with God of War, which I can't run at acceptable speeds)

There are also simple cel-shaded games like Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd that are slow, not because my pc can't handle it, but because PCSX still isn't optimized for those titles. Even people with monster rigs can't run them at consistent speeds. But that's emulation for ya.