Sony PlayStation 2

The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a sixth-generation console released by Sony Computer Entertainment on October 26, 2000 and it was retailed for $299.99. It has the Emotion Engine CPU at 300 MHz with 32MB of RDRAM system memory and 4MB of eDRAM (VRAM). Its GPU was a custom Graphics Synthesizer, which ran at 150 MHz. It became the highest selling console of all time with over 160 million units sold.

PCSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows, Linux, and macOS that supports a wide range of PlayStation 2 video games with a high level of compatibility and functionality. Although PCSX2 can closely mirror the original gameplay experience on the PlayStation 2, PCSX2 supports a number of improvements over gameplay on a traditional PlayStation 2, such as the ability to use custom resolutions up to 8192×8192, anti-aliasing, and texture filtering.

Batocera is shipping the latest PCSX2 Linux standalone binary. Check out the up-to-date official compatibility list for more information.

Place your Sony PlayStation 2 ROMs in /userdata/roms/ps2/.

The default button mapping to the PS2 controller is as following:

PS2 emulation with PCSX2 requires a relatively decent CPU with a good GPU for hardware acceleration. It will only work on x86/x86_64 machines. Even if your Batocera system does emulate Wii U or even PS3 games fine it may struggle with PCSX2 emulation in terms of graphic improvements or resolutation upscaling. You can find some PC performance measurements and recommendations on this page.

If you still have trouble try to keep the original resolution and default emulation settings. Some games need high-end, possibly overclocked CPUs or powerful GPUs, whereas some games run even on weak processors.

Due to how the synchronizing function of the audio plugin works, even when running games on a computer that is capable of going way above 100% speed in a stable fashion, random bits of time-stretched audio can be heard occasionally or even frequently.

A good workaround is to set the audio syncing method to Async Mix via pcsx2-config. This can cause A/V sync issues with certain games and is not recommended with rhythm games. Do not set it to None as it basically does the same thing as Async Mix but has more issues.

Be aware that some games relies on BIOS to get start-up parameters and thus may not work correctly with disabling the BIOS start animation. Therefore you should enable the boot animation in the first step for problematic games with ps2.fullboot=1.

Also ensure that automatic gamefixes are enabled in Batocera. If you still have problems take a look at the official PCSX2 Wiki and use the search function on that wiki to find information for the affected game.