Inside PCSX2: A Conversation with Developers GovanifY and fobes

For more than two decades, PCSX2 has been the go-to PlayStation 2 emulator, letting players revisit one of gaming’s most iconic libraries on modern hardware. What began as a scrappy open-source project has grown into a polished emulator with wide compatibility, powerful upscaling, and a dedicated community of contributors keeping the much-adored PS2 era alive.

Beyond technical progress, PCSX2’s greatest achievement might be cultural, ensuring that the PlayStation 2’s vast and varied library remains playable long after the original hardware has faded. For preservationists, modders, and nostalgic fans alike, it’s become a vital bridge between gaming’s past and present.

To learn more about how PCSX2 has evolved, what’s happening behind the scenes, and where it’s heading next, I spoke with two of its developers (GovanifY and fobes) about development challenges, community support, and the future of emulation.

I hope you enjoy!

Background:

What’s your history with the PlayStation 2 console itself?

GovanifY: It was the first console that I owned! I participated in a painting competition that my mother saw on some physical newspaper with my sister, we were about 6.
My mother did not think at all we would win and told me multiple times back then that it wouldn’t be a big deal if we lose and that at least we would have tried, but through sheer luck we did!

My mother was actually taken aback as she thought it would just be an artistic opportunity for us and did not think we would win. She actually did not want us to own a console as she thought we were too young, but since it was a “fait accompli” she caved and bought one game for my both of us; I got The Incredibles, and my sister Spongebob: The Movie

fobes: I was more of a PS3 person, but I did grow up playing on my PS2 and having my parents take me to Blockbuster to rent some games. I do have a vivid memory of a nightmare regarding the red screen of death lol.

How did each of you first get involved with PCSX2?

GovanifY: When I was around 11/12 I got involved in romhacking and ended up on a game specifically, Kingdom Hearts 2. I played this game originally on PCSX2 with a pretty low framerate on a ThinkPad W500 that was a surplus from my father’s business. I loved the game and ended up wanting to play the “Final Mix” edition of it, a re-release with additional content that was a Japan exclusive.
While there was an english fan translation, it had several major bugs and shortcomings and I figured it would be a good occasion to do a french translation, including the original french dub and some fandub.

I was already interested in reverse engineering and programming back then, and dived right in the project, made a bunch of tools to hack the game and stared way too long at MIPS in IDA Pro and memory dumps ^^”. This is also when I started to hack a bit around PCSX2, back then mostly to debug the game.

My first official patch happened much later and was related to KH2 again, when a friend of mine, Xaddgx, worked on a huge mod for PCSX2 that abused pnach (our game patching system) to its limit so much so he hit a hardcoded upper limit in PCSX2, I then went ahead and filed a PR that was eventually accepted, after rewriting a good bunch of the pnach handling system, since, while I was it, reviewers from back then asked me to do a bunch of “””tiny””” changes that piled up.

A year after that or so I then actually got involved with the community and bigger things than just a small patch, introducing PINE, plugin merges, and one thing lead to another and I became one of the lead developers of 2.0 and part of the official team.

fobes: I was more of a PS3 person, but I did grow up playing on my PS2 and having my parents take me to Blockbuster to rent some games. I do have a vivid memory of a nightmare regarding the red screen of death lol.

I was in my senior year of high school, 2019/2020. I had a bunch of my own random software projects but wasn’t motivated to work on them. I wanted to try and contribute to open-source instead, also with the intention of building up usable experience.

Looking for candidates for projects, I had memories of trying to play with PCSX2 on my old family computer. Changing all the settings to see what happens, “oh this one gives me 5 fps”, “oh this crashes PCSX2 to desktop.” I found it to be a fascinating program at the time.

I also had an interest in embedded development, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and try to learn PS2 development and contribute to PCSX2 at the same time.

I joined the Discord, and the rest is history.

Many long-running emulator projects are a mix of hobbyist and professional engineers. What are your individual development backgrounds and day jobs (if any), and do those skills perhaps help shape your work on PCSX2?

GovanifY: I’ve started programming since I was around 8… in assembly of all things! I wanted to understand how some program I had worked back then and I opened it up on OllyDbg, staring for hours not understanding much, but enough to have a better understanding than virtually everyone of my age haha.

As for my day job, I’m currently a PhD candidate at the french atomic energy comission (CEA). I’ve worked in industry, mostly in security, infrastructure and research roles, and I’ve been an MSc main intervening professor in computer security. My last job before the PhD was a (senior) Site Reliability Engineer, where I worked on designing a new secure infrastructure for some big cloud provider and maintaining the old one, also incident response.

fobes: For a while I was just a student who was also working at $BIG_RETAIL_STORE, no overlap there. But recently I landed a job doing C# desktop development. We do, well, lots of different things, but our big thing is museum/trade show exhibits. We have in-house developed embedded controllers for LEDs, motors, etc. So, I do it all from the frontend UI to the low-level serial communication with our boards.

Overall, I can’t think of exact skills I’ve transferred over. I do a lot more documentation at work, but I usually leave that to others for PCSX2 :^)

Was it gaming itself, or the programming side that got you hooked on PS2 emulation?

GovanifY: Definitely a bit of both. I love ps2 games and I think it was a more creative time for teams than the current production climate is, but I also just am a nerd in general and like solving problems. My reason for staying into PCSX2 was mostly out of spite, and proving some dolphin friends and acquaintances of mine that no, it isn’t an unmaintainable hackfest and that it’s on a similar scale than dolphin is, just with different problems.

fobes: The programming side. I’ve only finished a couple PS2 games, Pirates: Legend of Black Kat and Burnout 3. Some people are surprised when I tell them that I don’t really play games on PCSX2. If I were to have counted, I’ve probably spent more time using PCSX2 on my own homebrew than a game.

What does your family think you actually do when you’re working on PCSX2?!

GovanifY: Hrm, idk, slacking off? Maybe working? I mentioned to them a bit the project a while ago but I’m not sure they really understood what it was.

fobes: I usually simplify and just say “I make it so you can play PS2 games on the computer”, and it usually gets the point across. I was always the technology person in my family so trying to explain any further doesn’t get me far.

Have you maybe got any favorite stories while coding the emulator?

GovanifY: The friends I made along the way haha (yes it’s cliché). Besides that maybe the buffer overflows/underflows that happened because we were reading discs too fast and some amazing developers had timing based loading screens… We had to make a physical simulation of DVD reading speeds to fix that so hey, I guess we also emulate physics now: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/3877

Oh also smoking kills. Literally it kills the emulator https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/12112

fobes: A big portion of my earlier work on the emulator was hardware testing unknown behaviours. This was a side effect of me trying to figure out how to get the PS2 to do stuff. I remember finding out that our EE hardware counter wouldn’t reset if interrupts were disabled. I ended up fixing it and forgetting about it. Months later, it turns out I fixed Guitar Hero’s intro. That was my first actual fix to a game.

Not directly emulator development, but I spent months on-and-off trying to get a VU1 microprogram rendering something, anything. Finally, however, I rendered a 640x512 sprite. Here was my reaction:

_fobes: OMG IT FUCKING WORKED

_fobes: I DIDn't INITIALIZE THE VIDEO SHIT (edited)

_fobes: OMMG

_fobes: WHY AM I SO HAPPY TO SEE A GREY SCREEN (edited)

<insert screenshot of grey screen>

Now, give me 10/15 minutes and I’ll have it done. Quite an improvement from months of attempts.

The Emulator:

What were the hardest early problems (CPU emulation, EE/VU timing, GS graphics) and how were those overcome across releases?

GovanifY: That’s from waaaay before my time; CPU emulation isn’t the hardest thing in the world, VU timing though has been an issue forever and still is actually, the day we fix it is the day Marvel Nemesis runs, but fixing it would absolutely kill our performance because of the lockstep required.

fobes: I wasn’t around back then. I will give you a fun fact though, our IOP recompiler was copy and pasted from the PCSX recompiler. That code is older than me!

Just over a year ago we saw 2.0 released. Tell me what went into that?! It was a huge change to everything (removing plugins and moving to an integrated renderer and UI), and must have been a significant amount of work. Just a little insight would be fun!

GovanifY: A lot! I was the one that lead the 2.0 rewrite, the plugin merges, and all that. It involved splitting the UI code and the core code, making a new GPU debugger (twice!) making an entirely new EE debugger, making two new Uis (Qt and imgui), merging the plugins obviously, overhauling our CI and Linux infrastructure, switching from Django to Hugo for the website and then Docusaurus.

Funny note about that last point, the conversation internally about whether or not to use a CMS was so heated one former staff member removed my staff privileges! In the end though my ideas made it in the new website. If you look at the design, the little bar animation idea is from me! For the rest, you can thank a lot Vaser on that front for the amazing work when I became AWOL.

There was also a time where I worked on a DSL to have an easier time porting our JIT engine to newer architectures but I eventually canned the idea, it’s still something I’d be interesting in working on in the future.

It’s such a dense topic it’s kind of hard to explain in details but I did a 1h talk about all of this back when it was happening which explains in a bit more detail the plan, and you can see how it changed over time in (mostly) small ways:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/pcsx2/

fobes: Stenzek and Govanify made great work merging the plugins into the core application. Stenzek did incredible work with the UI. Our core had wxWidgets everywhere. I’m talking about wxStrings in the CPU recompilers. It was bad.

Now we build our core as a separate library, no Qt required. This makes building a frontend much easier and makes our GS regression testing software possible.

And the exceptions… exceptions were used for everything. Core needs to update the UI? UI needs to update the core? Use an exception.

It might’ve been a good idea at the time, but we usually consider it one of the main causes of the instability you can see in the 1.6 and older era.

I think Stenzek was so traumatized he made it so we disable exceptions completely :P

Emulating timing-sensitive systems like the PS2 can be fragile, how did you approach ‘correctness’ vs. performance trade-offs, what testing methodology do you use to catch regressions?

GovanifY:
Step 1: Can it run at decent speed? Y → Done N→ Continue
Step 2: Can it run at decent speed with a hack? Y → Done, try to make it general and not per game N→Continue
Step 3: Do you understand WTF you are doing? N→ go to Step 1 Y→ It’s Marvel Nemesis

(Dear reader, feel free to create a flowchart in your mind/draw.io/tikz)

fobes: Part of 1.6->2.0+ was cutting out a lot of the hacks. I know the GS had a lot of “CRC” hacks.

CRC hacks get quite messy “When a texture is read from here, in this format, with this framebuffer size, to this framebuffer position, do xyz.” It’s a form of high level emulation for an exact draw. It’s still used today, but we try and prioritize getting it right first.

W.r.t testing / correctness, I stated previously that a lot of my earlier work was related to hardware testing. Despite not getting too many direct commits in, a chunk of our correctness comes from the software I write for the PS2. If a GS dev needs a specific case tested ie “what happens when the framebuffer width is set to zero?”, I can write it out with some homebrew and we can compare between my PS2 and PCSX2.

For regression testing, we have our “GS Runner.” We have a bunch of GS Dumps (In other words, GPU Command captures) and can run them automatically against a PR and our master branch. It will give the developer the difference in texture uploads, swizzles, readbacks, and it can do a frame-by-frame analysis. Every GS change usually gets tested by 2000+ different scenes in games.

Our core emulation doesn’t change too much anymore, but we usually ask our testers to give some games a quick test to see if they are still working. Sometimes weabuse our nightly branch and do a little testing in production though :)

Can you walk through how PCSX2 handles per-game quirks (patching, per-game profiles, compatibility database) and how that system has evolved?

fobes: Originally in the 1.6 era there were no automatic game fixes. You would have to go through the maze of plugins and follow the “working” configuration on the wiki.

Now, we prioritize defaults. We have an entire database of every PS2 game called the gamedb.

We can automatically apply different settings, and it has support for patches embedded right in the gamedb YAML file.

The most recent big-ish change to it was the support for dynamic patches. Sometimes games load code (overlays) at different regions in memory (Looking at you R&C turret code). So instead of patching against a specific address, you patch against a set of instructions.

Ecosystem, Ethics, Ports:

PCSX2 has inspired ports and forks (for example AetherSX2 for Android and unofficial ports) How do you view those projects and what is your relationship (if any) with forks?

fobes: I try to remind us that a fork isn’t automatically hostile, but it’s hard. We’ve been burned many times by individuals, groups, and entire communities. It’s easier for us to tell users that we don’t have anything to do with it and if they want help with it, go ask them.

If they follow our license (GPL), it’s not our problem. We just ask that ports and forks do not use the PCSX2 name. It confuses users.

Emulation sits in a gray area around BIOS, dumps and IP. How does the team approach the legal/ethical side of distributing builds, docs, and talking about BIOS usage?

GovanifY: We require everyone using the software to dump their own BIOS. If we see in our community spaces indicators of piracy, whether it’s games or bios, we give users a warez role and ask them to prove that they own a console and the games in question.

fobes: I yapped (elaborated) more below, but we have a strict no-piracy policy. It’s not that we don’t want to help users, it’s just that we want to protect our project.

We try to make the emulator accessible despite our legal gray area. It’s why I wrote BiosDrain, to make BIOS dumping easier. It’s why we’ve spent countless hours on our setup guides.

If you could change one public misconception about PCSX2 or emulation in general, what would it be?

GovanifY: Hacks are not made because developers are incompetent (necessarily) but usually for performance reasons! If we made a cycle accurate PS2 emulator on x86 it would be unusably slow, just look at bsnes high accuracy mode to have an idea. And this is the _SNES_ out of all things.

Emulation is always a balance between accuracy and performance. If we can have accuracy then cool, but the main raison d’être of PCSX2 is to be able for people to play their games, not to be a perfect replica, same reason we have game enhancing hacks, such as widescreen and 60FPS for some games.

fobes: In terms of software development, and hardware utilization, running an emulator is nothing like running a PC game. Yes, the PS2 shovelware game that looks like garbage runs at 15fps when the PC game at 1080p that looks much better is running at 60fps.

Also, we can’t just “optimize” the emulator and make it faster, we’ve thought of that ;)

How do you all feel about the recent-ish emulators (Yuzu, Ryujinx), and the various Android emulators which end up being shut down?

GovanifY: Nintendo has been acting like a mafia since a while now against hackers and emudevs. If you haven’t heard about it, I encourage you to look at “Operation Belgian Waffle” in the Gigaleak where internal documents were showing how Nintendo effectively C&D’d a 3ds hacker, neimod, after hiring a PI to stalk him up to his parents place. Ryujinx is more of the same against gdkchan.

Yuzu is a bit more complicated situation, but the gist of it is: there was no legal decisions of any kind taken there, only a settlement against Tropic Haze LLC which, in theory, is not compelling enough evidence to enforce DMCAs on external people. It only happened because it would be infeasible to continue developing an emulator while being pressed down for attorney fees and an uncertain outcome.
Unfortunately, GitHub is what it is and has decided to enforce DMCA requests against any forks.

Forks will still happen, but now people are pissed too and are likelier to not have legal entities or real names Nintendo can use to pressure them. I don’t see this going well for them in the future (given enough interest).

fobes: It’s a little bit frightening, considering I’m the one in the position where, if a publisher or SCE wants to come for PCSX2, I’d be the one responsible.

I think we are known for our strict no-piracy policy. Some people hate us for it, and with that, I don’t really know what they expect from us. I sometimes try to explain to punished users that I don’t want to refuse support, I want to help users, that’s the entire goal of my work on this project. Do you think as an individual I agree with modern US copyright law?

(As an example) If you’re going to go into our space, and tell us that you downloaded every BIOS, and downloaded every version of Tetris Worlds, and ask us what one will be faster on your Intel Celeron with 3.5 GB of RAM, I can’t help but feel like it’s a bad look on us in the eyes of a lawyer or publisher. That they’d think we are helping the infringement of their new re-release of Tetris Worlds. Or that Sony finds us to be a pain in their neck and they nail us for facilitating downloads of their systems firmware, despite such a statement being total nonsense.

Community:

PCSX2 has a huge fanbase on YouTube, forums, Discord, and Reddit. Does community feedback make its way into development decisions? PCSX2 has a die-hard community, do they play a part at all? How important has the community been in building and maintaining the compatibility database over the years?

GovanifY: Many former developers were once community! Especially in the plugins and PCSX2 Playground eras, where external contributors could have as much of a role if not bigger as the main PCSX2 Team, before becoming officially a part of it. The compatibility database and wiki is also mostly created by the community.

fobes: Testing is probably the biggest contribution we get from our community. We have the many years of users to thank for the PCSX2 wiki and forum compatibility reports.

If there’s one thing I’d like to say to PCSX2 users, please feel free to drop by and tell us about a possible issue you’ve had. The worst types of bugs or regressions are the ones we don’t know about, so believe it or not, we like it when you tell us that our software is broken lol

How did you balance catering to advanced users (who want per-game tweaks, config options) with newcomers who just want ‘plug and play’?

GovanifY: Since 2.0 we let pcsx2 auto configure itself with a GameDB, which is almost always the best configuration possible. You can still play with the knobs separately and overwrite the configuration though.

fobes: We have an “advanced” settings option that enable the user to customize pretty much whatever they like. We don’t provide support for when it is enabled in most cases, so just keep that in mind.

Our number one goal now is “plug and play.” PCSX2 before version 2.0 was a mess of different menus, no per-game configurations, no automatic configurations, sometimes you needed a different plugin, once again, it was a mess. We actively manage our defaults now. In 95% of cases a user can auto-map their controls, turn up the resolution, and sometimes the blending (we notify the user when the game can benefit from it).

Do you see PCSX2 as mainly a tool for enthusiasts, or has it grown into something that belongs to a broader gaming audience?

GovanifY: Absolutely a broader audience. Many new generations have never even played PS2 games before they ran PCSX2 and it allows them to discover games they never knew growing up! As more time passes I think that virtually all new gamers will either play remakes or on emulator for PS2 copies, especially since DVDs eventually bitrot...

fobes: I think PCSX2 has grown to be something for a broader audience now. We actively strive to have a native feeling gaming experience, with goodies like big picture mode. It’s quite accessible now if you just want to play some PS2 classics with little to no hassle.

Do you have any stories of particularly dedicated community testers or contributors who went above and beyond?

GovanifY: Honestly it’s harder to not think about that for some testers, the amount of time wasted sometimes for nothing or tedious/boring work is pretty mindboggling from our testers and I cannot thank them enough for that. For contributors, well, pretty much everybody in the PCSX2 Team have been particularly dedicated for reasons that baffles me to this day (yes this includes me).

fobes: Too many! I applaud those who kept sane while working on our “gamedb.” Every single PS2 game name, serial, and their settings defaults are in there. That’s way too much YAML for me.

I’d also like to appreciate our translators. The collective work they’ve done is incredible.

How do you keep community engagement lively after so many years: social media, forums, or other methods?

GovanifY: Trick question, we don’t! :D Our forums are mostly dead, social media wise we only have mastodon left to which someone writes occasionally news there, with a few nice folks replying. Our discord is by far our biggest social place and it’s mostly users asking questions like this:

Joke aside, we have a bunch of nice regular people we chat with on our discord and like to help, so Discord is probably the best place to reach us at for now.

fobes: Lately we’ve created a mastodon account, and we are trying to keep followers up to date with some of our big changes. We are all active in Discord as well, so if members have any questions, we are usually happy to answer.

The future & beyond:

Now that PCSX2 seems largely feature-complete, how do you decide what fixes, updates, or small improvements are worth prioritizing going forward?

GovanifY: Mostly personal interest really. It’s a FOSS project so it doesn’t go at our pace, but also the pace of independent contributors. If one of us is motivated to do something, it just means it will get done faster, not that it won’t get done at all.

fobes: We are still picking away at some GS issues and doing some optimizations. We have a contributor working on software floating point.

I personally have been working on some tooling and have made some progress at an EE ARM JIT for apple silicon.

We don’t really coordinate on what gets done next. Contributor time is a finite resource, any work that gets done is appreciated, even if it’s a small UI change or a comment fix.

Are there particular areas (compatibility, performance, or platform support) where you still see meaningful gains to be made, even if PCSX2 is essentially in maintenance mode now?

GovanifY: Soft floats is a big one, that is, emulating accurately floats in software, compared to our much faster (but incorrect) use of a computer’s own hardware FPU with clamping and other tricks.
It would allow for a lot of games to run in better shape and I think it’s our biggest PR currently in the pipeline.

fobes: Off the top of my head:

• An ARM JIT for Apple Silicon and WoA.
• Full TLB support for PS2 Linux (and that weird goemon game that expects a TLB miss).
• Exception Level 2 support
• Software Floating Point
• Cue support

Meaningful gains to be made, but the lowest priority would be PS1 emulation.

How do you envision the role of the emulator in 5–10 years?

GovanifY: Same as today, it will play ps2 games, probably better, hopefully not worse.

fobes: About the same. I assume that as time goes on the emulator might get a little more popular as more people get older and look for some nostalgia. I know that during modern re-releases of games or additions to series people like to pick the old PS2 version of the game and play.

I’d also like to see some more homebrew game development for the PS2. It’d be cool if someone could download an open-source BIOS and game and just start playing games.

Bonus!

Do you still enjoy console gaming? Collects them? Physical game collections are so different from digital versions

GovanifY: Yes, I do very much still enjoy it! I do collect them to some degree but my collection isn’t very impressive...

fobes: It’s not that I don’t like console gaming, I just prefer PC gaming. No collection here, just 20 PS2 games and a couple of PS2s.

Your top 5 retro and top 5 modern games?

GovanifY: For some definition of retro, in no particular order:

• Xenogears,
• Super Metroid
• Super Mario Galaxy,
• Kingdom Hearts 2,
• Metal Gear Solid 3

Trying to get varied genres and eras there. Also I absolutely love Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and OOT/MM obviously but I already wasted the RPG cards ^^”

Modern uh, I’d go with:

• Signalis,
• Deltarune,
• Disco Elysium,
• Witcher 3,
• Outer Wilds.

It’s really hard to pick only 5 you know? Especially since I don’t really rank them myself. They are all amazing games in different genres.

fobes: Retro – Not in any order:

• Gran Turismo 3
• Guitar Hero 4
• Pirates: Legend of Black Kat
• Simpsons: Hit and Run (it’s actually not a great game now that I’m older, sorry…)

Modern – In order:

• Battlefield 4
• Rainbow Six Siege
• Counterstrike 2 (sans cheaters)

Are there any other devs or projects (emulators or otherwise) which are a direct inspiration to you?

GobanifY: Dolphin is very obviously an inspiration projects wise, and so was Near emudev wise. marcan (from fail0verflow) is also a big inspiration.

FOSS projects wise there are so much… KDE and GNOME, KiCAD, Krita, Blender, systemd, Rust, I couldn’t really cite all of them if I wanted!

But the world isn’t just developers, people like Lena Raine, Yoko Shinomura and so many academic researchers I wouldn’t know who to cite had a big influence on me. Heck, to stay on names people actually know, Cédric Villani was a research director at my university!

fobes: I’d have to thank refractionpcsx2. He was always able to help me out with PCSX2 / PS2 development. I probably would’ve gone back to playing Battlefield 4 and making prime number calculators if it weren’t for his help.

Any advice for anyone looking to create their own software?

GovanifY: Do it? You learn by doing! While I agree that it’s not the most helpful comment, it’s the most important, to be motivated.
Once you are, you can try to see bits by bits to split up your big problem in smaller problems, see how other software do it, try to copy and improve on that. Language semantics aren’t the hardest part and you can learn them in a few days of reading/practicing, the methodology of “how do I go about solving this particular problem” is.

fobes: If you’re not trying to solve a problem, make sure you’re having fun.

More helpful advice? Here is some for individuals new to software development:

• Don’t get caught up in decisions that don’t matter. I’ve seen too many people look at the 150 different OSS, and non-OSS licenses and try to determine what one to use. If someone wants to steal your precious code, they will steal it regardless of its license. Get a general idea on how you want your code to be used and use one of the 5 main ones. Don’t make your license difficult to understand for another dev or end user.
• I’m sorry, but chances are no one wants to buy your pet project. You’re an individual making a complete game engine? Great! You’re going to be closed source and you’re trying to sell it? No! I hate to be callous, but you will probably burn yourself out chasing money, completely ignoring the joy you could’ve had learning what you now know. And if you get no joy from learning software, I don’t know what to tell you, maybe puruse something different.

Any last words?

GovanifY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3CKgkyc7Qo (From the movie Hackers, a so-bad-it’s-so-good one of a kind experience)

Also don’t lose hope with the current political climate, better times will come. Be kind to each others and respect people, no matter how different, as human beings. Also, don’t be a bigot. Please. Your right ends where other individuals begin.

fobes: I’d just like to say thanks to our community, including our lurkers, and to the many people who have worked on PCSX2 who I’ve never met.

Also, to the community, we love hearing your support.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more grey screens to get excited about.

Chatting with GovanifY and fobes really highlights how much work goes into keeping PCSX2 alive and running smoothly. It’s not just about code, it’s about making sure fans can enjoy these games decades later without headaches or crashes. Much it depends on a small group of passionate developers and a supportive community. There’s clearly a lot of love behind every update and feature, and while it is close to complete, I'm still so excited to see each new little update that might be coming.

A big thanks to both GovanifY and fobes for taking the time to chat to me. It’s conversations like this that remind me why emulation matters, and why PS2 games still feel so alive today. I wasn't around for the PS2 generation, but it's entirely through PCSX2 that I've gotten to fall in love with the games on that platform.

I've been curating a little set of PS2 games on my Steam Deck (I use RetroDECK to emulate on my handheld!), and getting to chat to both of these devs has been a treat to me. So I hope you've enjoyed this too!

For further information and links on PCSX2:

• Here is the PCSX2 site.
• Their GitHub page.
• The link to their Discord.
• Their Mastodon account (which I’m encouraging because I’m obsessed with Mastodon!)
• And their YouTube channel is here, too.

Finally, if you'd like to keep up with my gaming news and posts, you can find me on Mastodon too, with this link here!