Playing PS2 games on PC?

Although Playstation 2 is now couple of years old and recently released Playstation 3 is in the centre of attraction, the older sister still has plenty to offer. It is however more and more hard to purchase it in stores around here, since most of them concentrate on the new (and much more expensive) PS3.

There is however possibility to play your PS2 games on PC hardware, thanks to the one and only emulator that is capable of doing it - PCSX2. The current version 0.9.2 is pretty stable and allows you to play many popular games.

Those that have seen some of the gems like Final Fantasy X probably guess that the hardware requirements will be high, but that is the same with all the emulators. Here we are talking about Core 2 Duo E6550, 1GB RAM and native Pixel Shader 2.0 graphic card (GF7+).

http://www.pcsx2.net/image.php?id=1147789651j02

The only thing that doesn't work in this emulator and does in the original PS2 hardware is support for Playstation 1 games. But if you need emulator for PS1, there are quite few out there, and they will work well and smooth on any PC purchased in the past 2 years.