The 2.0 version of PCSX2, the best PS2 emulator
for a PC, has finally been released. A lot of the changes and improvements here on 2.0 have
been around since the nightly build of PCSX2, and several improvements for graphics and
performance across the whole emulator. In this video, I'll show you the
full setup for PCSX2 on your PC with the best settings so you can play your
favorite PS2 games on PC. Let's get going! The first step is downloading the
emulator itself, and it's available here on their website. I'll put the link to
this in the description of the video. Right here on the main page, you want to click on
"latest stable." It's going to list all the systems that this emulator is available for.
This tutorial is for Windows 10 and 11, so I'm going to click on the first option, "installer."
There's also the portable version available here, but we're going to get the installer one because
it keeps all the required files and folders in the same place. Go ahead and click on this one.
It's going to come as a single .exe file like this one, so go ahead and double-click on
it. Very likely, you're going to get this message from Windows saying that this file is
apparently a virus, but this is just because it is a new file and it hasn't been checked by
them yet. But it's safe, so go ahead and click on "more info" and then click on "run anyway."
Then it will take us to the installation process. On the first screen, you want to go ahead and
select the portable installation right here. The only difference from this one is that all the
files are going to be kept in the same folder, so it's much better for organizing
everything. Now click on "next." Now you have to select the folder where you want
the emulator to be installed, and ideally, you should keep the installation folder as the
one that it tells you because this emulator can have some problems if you install it on external
drives or something like that. So it's best that you keep it here on the C drive. That's what I'm
going to do here, so go ahead and click on "next." Now, this is the option if you want to create
a start menu shortcut for this one as well. I'm just going to go ahead and click on "next" right
here. Now it's going to ask you if you want to create a desktop shortcut. I'm going to go ahead
and checkmark this one. Now you can review your settings. When you're done, go ahead and
click on "install." This should only take a few seconds here. Then finally, we can launch
PCSX2. So make sure this one is checked here and click on "finish," and we now have arrived at the
setup wizard window. Some options here to select the language and the theme for this emulator.
This emulator is available in multiple languages right here, so just select the one you want to
play. I'm just going to select the default one, which is English. You can also change the theme
as well. I'm going to keep mine on "dark fusion gray," but if you click on them, you can see how
they look right here. You have a bunch to select from, but in my case, I'm just going to keep this
one here. You can also make the emulator check for updates every time you start it. That's
up to you. I would recommend leaving this on actually so you can get the latest fixes and
enhancements. Now go ahead and click on "next." Now here you have to select the folder where you
want the emulator to scan for the BIOS files, and because I selected the default installation,
they are all located right here on the C drive. There's a PCSX2 folder and then the BIOS folder.
I already navigated here on my computer where this is located. Once again, PC > Local Disk (C:) >
PCSX2. So this is going to depend on where you choose to install everything. Right here, inside
the PCSX2 folder, there is the BIOS folder inside, and this is where you're going to be placing
the BIOS file. The BIOS files are protected by copyright, so ideally, you should get them by
dumping your BIOS from your PS2 into your PC, or you can try to find them on the
internet. But this is something that I can't show you here on the video because it
is against YouTube's guidelines. If I share a link for BIOS download or just show in the
video how you can get them on the Internet, YouTube will delete my video. So when you finally
have them with you, you're just going to drop the file here in this folder. It's going to
look something very similar to this one, a bin file, but it can also come as a different
file type here. So you're going to drop it in this folder. Now you're going to go back to the
installation setup here, and you're going to click on "refresh list." Then if you did it right,
the BIOS file will be located right here. Now you just have to click on the BIOS file once to
highlight it. Now go ahead and click on "next." This time you're going to select the folder
where you want the emulator to scan for games. For this one, what I like to do here is to go
back to the PCSX2 folder, and I like creating a new folder here by clicking on the folder with
the right button. Then you click on "new" and then "folder," and I simply just create a new folder
here called "games" like this. Now you're going to go back to the emulator, then you're going to
click here on "add." It should open the previous folder where you were. In my case, it was the
BIOS folder, right? So now I'm just going to navigate to the emulator folder, and then I'm just
going to click on the games folder once and then click on "select folder." Then it will ask you if
you want the emulator to scan this folder every time you open it. Go ahead and click on "yes,"
so every time you put a new game in here, the emulator will recognize it as soon as you start
it. You can also select multiple folders here; it doesn't have to be just a single one. You
can just click here on "add" and keep adding more folders where the game files are going
to be. Then when you're done, click on "next." Now we have to configure the controller. This
emulator has an automatic mapping function, so if you already have the device you want to
use plugged into your computer, you're going to make sure that you have DualShock 2 selected
here. Then you're going to click on "automatic mapping," and it's going to list all the available
devices to be used as a controller. In my case, I have an Xbox controller, so I'm going to click
here on SDL-0, and just like that, it's ready. This emulator supports all the DualShock
controllers and Xbox controllers as well, and even third-party controllers if you can make
them be recognized as Xbox controllers. You can use your keyboard as well if that's what you want
to do. Later on, I'm going to show you how to further configure your controllers, but for now,
if you want to also use the port two controller if you want to play games locally, do the exact same
thing here for controller port two. Now go ahead and click here on "next," and we're done with the
setup installation. Now click here on "finish," and it's going to take us to the emulator itself,
which is going to look something like this. This is blank because I haven't added any games to the
folder, right? If you followed exactly what I did here and you also have the games folder with you,
this is where you're going to be dropping your game files. One of the best and most common
formats for PCSX2 is having the games as an ISO format like this. And just like the BIOS,
I can't show you here on the video where to get them. Ideally, you should get them by dumping
your copies of your game into your PC and having them as a single ISO is enough here for this
emulator. So now you're going to go back to PCSX2, and you're just going to click here on "scan for
new games," and just like that, the games in there are going to show up here. Now we're going to
configure the emulator settings for the best graphics and performance. I'm going to start with
the general settings of this emulator and then we're going to do the game-specific settings. So
start by clicking here on settings and then click on the first option available: interface. On this
first tab, there are some options here, but they don't affect the performance or the quality of
the emulator. Stuff like starting the emulator at full screen if you want to do that. Also, hide
the cursor in full screen as well. Actually, this one is pretty good. I'm going to use that.
So configure this one in the way you want it. So now we're going to head over here to the BIOS
tab. In here, we have the option to enable fast boot on the emulator, and this will skip the PS2
startup screen whenever you start a game. This is useful if you just want to get to your games
fast, and there's also a fast forward boot as well so you can start the game even faster. But
these options can break some games, so I would not recommend using this one—only the fast boot
really if you want to skip the startup screen. Now we're going to head over to
the emulation tab, and right here, the only options that you want to make sure you
have enabled are enable multithread V1 and enable instant V1. The rest you don't have to change. In
fact, it's best that you don't because this will affect the gameplay speed, and you should only
use this if you really know what you're doing. The next option is the graphics tab, and this
is where the fun is going to start. Right here on top, where it says renderer, there's a few
graphical outputs we can select. Vulkan is the one that performs the best for most games out there on
this emulator, but if your GPU is outdated, it's not going to show up in here. If that's the case,
the second best, in my opinion, is OpenGL, but Direct 3D 11 and 12 are also pretty good in here.
So if you're not sure what to choose from, you can go ahead and leave it on automatic, but if you
have Vulkan, I would definitely recommend trying with this one on. But if you don't like it, choose
either OpenGL or Direct 3D. I'm going to leave Vulkan selected here. And here on adapter, you
want to choose the graphics card that you want the emulator to use if you have a multiple GPU setup.
That is, in my case, I only have the GeForce RTX 3070, so that's what I'm going to select here.
Now on display, there's only borders full screen to select here on full screen mode. And here on
aspect ratio, this is the option that you want to use if you want to stretch the image of your
game. Some games on the PS2 are only available on the 4:3 aspect ratio, but some of them also
have an option for widescreen 16:9. If you select widescreen and the game does not have support for
that, the emulator will stretch the screen of the game to fit your monitor. But there's something
very nice about PCSX2, which are the cheats, and a lot of games have support for widescreen patch
on this emulator. So I'm going to cover this later on in the video, but if you don't know which one
to select for now, keep it on auto standard here. The next three options, the FMV as raw,
the interlacing, and bilinear filtering, you don't have to change. They're good to go on
the default option here. Now let's head over to the rendering tab, and the first option here,
internal resolution, is one feature that can make games look much better here on the emulator.
You can either play your games on their native PS2 resolution here or you can change all the way
to 5K resolution. And ideally, here, you want to select the resolution option that matches
the resolution of your monitor. In my case, I have a 1080p monitor, so ideally, I want to
leave it here on 3x native. But if you have a powerful PC and you want to go beyond that, you
can select a resolution that is higher than your monitor. The emulator will render the game at
that resolution, but it's going to be fit to be displayed on the resolution of your monitor. For
the remaining options, the only one that I'm also going to change here is anisotropic filtering.
This one will make your games look much better, and it has minimal impact on your GPU, so you
can go ahead and select 16x with no trouble. The remaining options ideally you want to
leave them on the default here unless the emulator tells you. That's because when you start
the game, the emulator will tell you what are the best settings that you should use on rendering
in order to get the best emulation out of the game. But be aware that these options can affect
the performance on the emulator, especially on the CPU. This option here, blending accuracy,
is one that's particularly heavy on the CPU, so use this one depending on the specs that
you have and what the emulator tells you. On the texture replacement tab, these are the
options that you want to change here if you're going to install one of those HD texture packs
for your game. This emulator supports that, and you can find these texture packs out
on the Internet and also if you just want to mod your game. Next, you're going to
head over to the post-processing tab, and you have some options here like sharpening
with FXAA, and it usually looks pretty good on the emulator. There's also features here too,
like, for example, the Lotus CRT. This one is useful if you want to play your games like if
you were playing on an actual old television, like if you were playing on an actual CRT monitor.
So if you want a look that tries to be faithful to an actual PS2, this is the option here.
There's also some other stuff if you want to mess with them and have fun. This is up to you.
Next, we just have the OSD and recording tabs, and this is just stuff if you want to show the
FPS on your game if you want to get rid of the notifications it shows up on the top left
corner of the screen as well, and also for recording too if you want to do actual gameplay
recordings without using external software. We now only have the audio tab here that you
should leave as default unless you know what you're doing. Here also is the memory cards tab
here if you want to format or use a different memory card or use a memory card that you got from
the Internet that has a specific save file from the game you're playing. You can do that here
as well. And also the network configuration, this emulator can play games online, and I
actually have a video here on the channel showing you how to play online on PCSX2. I'll
put the link to that one in the description of this video as well. And that's pretty much
it here for the standard settings of PCSX2. Now for the game-specific settings. With your
games loaded in here, in my case, I'm going to use Black as an example, you're going to click on
your game with the right button and then you're going to click here on properties. It's going to
open a window that's very similar to the one that we were messing with just now, but we now have
the patches and the cheats tab available. And to patch your game, you simply have to click here
on patches, and the emulator will find the patches available to your game. And to activate them in
your game, you just have to click here on enable, and the next time you start, it's going to enable
those cheats. Be aware that some of them will have additional settings that you have to change in
order for them to work properly, like the 60 FPS code for Black, for example. You also have to
enable the overclock under the emulation tab here in order to make sure that this one works
properly. And there's the widescreen patch that I talked about before. Most games will have
this one here, and if you're going to use that, make sure that you go to the graphics tab here and
then change the aspect ratio to widescreen 16:9. Not every game will have their patches available
here because they actually have to import those into the emulator database, so there are some
that might be missing. And if that's the case, you have to manually add them yourself, and I
happen to have a video here on the channel that covers that as well. So I'm going to leave the
link in the description of this video as well. Now the next thing that I want to show you here is
the option to add cover art to your games. Right here on the options, you're going to click here on
this icon that has these four squares right here, and it's going to switch to the cover art
display. There's nothing selected here, and there is a fast way that you can get high-quality
cover art to all the games that you currently have on the emulator. First, you're going to click
here on tools, and then you're going to select cover downloader. Now on this window, we just
have to input the URL to download covers from, and there is one that was made just for PCSX2,
and it can be found on this post right here on GitHub. It's simply called PS2 covers. I'll put
the link in the description of the video as well, and they have a software that works really well,
but it's much better for us to just grab the URL and just paste that on the emulator. And
they give us an option here to download covers in the default format and also 3D
covers. In my case, I'm going to go with the 3D covers here. So you're going to copy the
URL here provided, or you can just click here, just copy that for you, and now go back to
the emulator, and you just have to paste the link right here and then click on start. And in
just a matter of seconds, depending on how many games you have here, it's going to download the
3D cover art for you or the standard format if you select that. If you want to change from the
3D format to the standard one or the other way around, you have to delete the covers first. And
you can find them here on the emulator folder, right here on the covers folder. Then
you just have to delete those from here, and you just have to repeat the
process again of selecting the tools here and then cover downloader. But
this time, you're going to paste the link of the standard cover folder or the 3D
one, depending on what you had before. Finally, when you're ready to play your games,
you just have to simply double-click them here on the emulator, and they will start as
such. I have many other tutorial videos like this on the channel, and if you want
to directly support me with a donation, the link will be in the description of this
video. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and also leave a like on this video. Thank
you for watching, and I'll see you soon!
