PCSX2 PS2 Emulator: Progress report Q3 2019 to Q1 2020

https://pcsx2.net/292-progress-report-q3-2019-to-q1-2020.html

by boramalper • 6 years ago

123 54 6 years ago

pcsx2.net

mahrain• 6 years ago

Does anyone know why the Mac port has not been updated since 2012 (but downloads are still being offered)?

mister_hn• 6 years ago

Is still Mac a relevant platform for gaming?

You can try run it in a virtual machine

brootstrap• 6 years ago

for indie games yup... been rocking mostly indie, rogue like, single player , 2D type stuff. 2013 mac air still going strong!! 500+ hours of darkest dungeon, slay the spire, isaac... serious bang for buck getting hundreds of hours from 3 games totaling like $60 dollars

bluescrn• 6 years ago

Macs tend to lack decent GPUs, and Apple’s approach to backwards compatibility/industry standards (removing 32bit support and with it half of the Mac Steam library, and deprecating OpenGL) is hardly encouraging people to support the platform when it comes to anything gaming-related.

danielscrubs2• 6 years ago

Macs tend to lack decent GPU

Are you saying the majority of the emulation calculation nowadays are done in a gpgpu fashion in that emulator? For if that's the case, it would be insanely cool.

Wowfunhappy4• 6 years ago

Macs tend to lack decent GPUs

In 2012, I played through the entirety of Persona 4 in PCSX2 on a Macbook Air with an Intel HD Graphics 4000.

I was using Bootcamp (even back then when it was more current, getting the native Mac version to actually run was a PITA), but clearly the hardware is sufficient. Persona 4 is among the easier games to emulate IIRC, but I'd expect that in 2020 both the hardware and software would be more capable.

bzb3• 6 years ago

From my experience with open source projects: nobody in the team owns a Mac.

john_alan2• 6 years ago

I disagree with that. macOS is basically BSD and it’s great for Dev. Most of the devs I work with use it.

q92z8oeif• 6 years ago

I wonder if a forum outside of the silicon valley bubble would have so so many apple apologists like we have in this thread.

---

apple is bullish on metal vs vulkan because they want to lock in apps. and they have the upper hand because by not implementing vulkan, they force everyone to chose between the money on IOS or everything else. it's not a technical decision.

middle ware provide only the minimum common denominator, or expensive translation functions, it is not even close to providing the flexibility and speed modern emulators need.

absolutely nobody plays on apple hardware. specially not the people that are into gaming enough to write an emulator. no matter how much you personally want to believe the opposite.

galad872• 6 years ago

Probably because there were no contributor interested in porting it to macOS. There is some activity on https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 , it seems the biggest issue is that the PCSX2 JIT is 32bit only.

chkuendig• 6 years ago

See https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/18 Looks like there's a working build again.

Wowfunhappy4• 6 years ago

Anyone manage to build a binary from that tree? I'd be interested to try it.

Wowfunhappy4• 6 years ago

PCSX2's JIT is 32bit only, so that's probably one reason at least more recently.

pedrocx4862• 6 years ago

I always wondered why most emulators keep OpenGL/DirectX as renderers instead of porting to Vulkan, I imagine because that would be an insanely tall task to tackle?

fulafel• 6 years ago

You can cover most users with OpenGL + DirectX, so it's good to keep them. Vulkan is more rare. Also making software is slow, Vulkan is a new API.

MrBuddyCasino• 6 years ago

Vulkan is also unpleasant to use directly. If WebGPU takes off, I'd bet that becomes the common API everyone codes against, because it will be everywhere and its a better developer experience.

MegaDeKay• 6 years ago

Emulators with Vulkan include RPCS3, Dolphin, Flycast, Yuzu, PPSSPP, Xenia...

pedrocx4862• 6 years ago

Nice, I wasn't aware of those using Vulkan, especially Dolphin. Thanks for pointing out.

pantalaimon• 6 years ago

Easy, because nobody has written a Vulkan backend yet. I would expect those emulators would be happy about patches for that.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

If your programmers all exclusively have experience in DirectX/OpenGL, you're likely to stick with what you 100% know works and will be fastest for your team.

Fej• 6 years ago

PCSX2 is a really nice piece of software and often gets overshadowed by more popular emulators, it's really nice to see the devs getting some attention. The feats they've accomplished are substantial - I'd go so far to say that it's the best way to play many PS2 games.

nyanpasu64• 6 years ago

From reading this progress report (I'm not an active user of PCSX2), it seems this emulator uses per-game hacks frequently. On the other hand, Dolphin (which I'm a semi-active user and used to follow development) never performs per-game disk patches and only rarely uses per-game emulator-level hacks.

djmips• 6 years ago

It's true but the PS2 is a much more convoluted system to emulate with more moving parts and undocumented behaviour in the timing and interaction between these parts as compared to the relatively simpler Gamecube. This also made the Gamecube easier to develop for IMO (I developed games on both systems)

twistedcheeslet• 6 years ago

The PS2 emulation scene is what ended up driving me to IT and eventually software development back when they hosted their forums on NGEmu. Tons of respect to all the contributors for keeping the endeavor alive - incredible what they've managed to accomplish.

Unrelated, has anyone ever tried getting PCSX2 to run on ARM chips?

opencl• 6 years ago

There's an Android port but unfortunately it's by some company that's selling it and blatantly violating the GPL.

https://pcsx2.net/286-the-pcsx2-team-s-statement-regarding-t...

colejohnson66• 6 years ago

I was initially gonna say the GPL permits selling your software, and even says you don’t have to release the code to everyone (just those who own your software), but then the developer said they will open source at 80 million downloads? That’s a violation.

PCSX2 PS2 Emulator: Progress report Q3 2019 to Q1 2020

Related Stories