Since Odette does not use her website but we keep paying for the damn thing (as my wife always says she is planning to post something but never got to it in the last 10 years) I decided to post something about my favorite PlayStation 2 games. If she knew I did this she would be very annoyed, so I’m curious when (or if) she ever finds this page….it may take another 10 years or so (if ever), so I guess I’ve nothing to worry about.
I was late to buy a PlayStation 2, in the past I played the ‘old’ computers like the Commodore64 and MSX, but after I moved to another city I lost these computers and did not really follow the progress of game computers, I did of course see that there was a PlayStation 1 and an Xbox in the shops, and I always was kind of interested when I saw kids playing the demo consoles in stores, but I did not have much time and never bought one.
Around 2005 a colleague offered me his 2nd hand Playstation 2 for a nice price, so I decided to buy it. Another colleague borrowed me his favorite racing game Gran Turismo 3, as he was finished with it, and I had a lot of fun with it. I was not able to finish that game, as my colleague asked the game back, and then I bought my first PS2 game which just came out ‘Forbidden Siren’ (or Siren for the US). I played this game for years, and I have a very fond memory of it. I’m not very good with games, and I was only playing if I had time or in the weekends, and as that game is quite long and kind of difficult to make progress I only played this game and Gran Turismo 4 which I also bought when it came out..literally for years.
When I found out about FreeMcBoot I tried this on my PS2 and it worked perfect, I also bought a 8BitDo Retro receiver for it so I could connect my PS4 controller to the PS2:
https://www.8bitdo.com/retro-receiver-for-ps/
And yes, I have also a PS4 but lately I’m more into the older games again on the PS2, as the PS4 games are so long and I don’t have much time to play it and I want to catch up on some of the best of rest the almost 4000 PS2 games which I never got to play.
However, I don’t like to play on the PS2 anymore, as the resolution on our LCD tv kind of bad. I got very interested to catch up with the PS2 developments when I learned the PSX2 emulator, which has much improved in the last few years, and this emulator now makes it so easy to play all my favorite PS2 games on PC, and it’s so much more convenient then to play on a real PS2, you can save whenever you like, which is quite handy to go through the games a bit quicker and for someone who does not have much time to play. And in this emulator you have put the resolution to HD quality or better, the old games looks amazing in this emulator.
There are many guides online, but for me to catch up to learn again how to write on WordPress, I’ll point out the steps I took below:
First I bought a 2nd hand Dell Optiplex 3040 on eBay:
And I bought a new SSD, upgraded the memory to 16GB (although 8GB is fine for PSX2) and bought a low profile graphic card since I’m only going to play PS2 games on this computer, the PULSE AMD RadeonRX 6400:
https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/pulse-radeon-rx-6400-4g-gddr6
I placed 2 SSD’s in it, one for Linux and one for Windows 10 (I prefer to use Linux, but sometimes I still need Windows).
And it works fantastic, the games I tried play almost exactly as on the PS2 but the resolution is so much better.
swann&smerlin 