With all the extra firepower in their tiny chassis, modern Raspberry Pi boards are more than capable of emulating older gaming systems. Since I’ve already tested PSP, Wii, and PlayStation 1 titles on the Raspberry Pi 5, I set my sights on PS2 emulation. After all, it couldn’t be any more difficult (and hopeless) than running PlayStation 3 games on the SBC, right?

Sadly, unlike other retro consoles, there isn’t an official PlayStation 2 emulator designed for the Raspberry Pi, making this wacky idea even more experimental than my usual DIY projects. But after spending some hours emulating my PlayStation 2 library on the SBC, I’d say PS2 emulation is a mixed bag, especially since there isn’t an actively maintained emulator for the console. If you want more details about this misadventure, here’s a log of my attempts at getting PS2 games running on my Raspberry Pi 5.

My initial attempts at running AetherSX2 failed miserably

In its defense, the emulator was discontinued several months ago

Although x86 systems are blessed with a couple of PlayStation 2 emulators, the situation is completely different on the Arm side. There aren't any working PCSX2 or Play! ports, and AestherSX2 is pretty much the only emulator that can run PS2 games on non-Mac Arm processors. Unfortunately, it’s no longer in active development due to certain altercations between the developer and the emulation community.

Regardless, I decided to press on with the installation process. My first attempt involved installing the emulator directly on the Raspberry Pi OS, which failed miserably when the emulator refused to launch, let alone boot any PS2 titles. Since I’m a fan of FydeOS, I decided to use its Android subsystem to emulate AetherSX2. Sadly, it resulted in the same outcome as the previous method, and flashing an Android distro didn’t help either.

AetherSX2 is rather daunting to set up in RetroPie

It's worth all the trouble though

While I’d heard good things about Ubuntu, I decided to take the long road by installing the AetherSX2 core inside RetroPie. If you’ve gone through my emulation projects, you’d know I’m not fond of the unnecessarily complicated setup procedure for RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi 5. But with nothing to lose, I flashed Raspberry Pi OS Lite on my tinkering companion, grabbed the RetroPie setup script using git, and executed it after assigning admin access to it via the chmod command.

After waiting for nearly an hour, the script worked its magic and installed RetroPie on the SBC. With that, I used SSH to access the system and install some Vulkan drivers.

sudo apt install vulkan-tools mesa-utils mesa-vulkan-drivers -y

But my work was far from done, as I had to set a different kernel image inside RetroPie. Using the nano editor, I opened the /boot/firmware/config.txt file and appended the following lines of code at the end:

#kernel selection 
kernel=kernel8.img 

Since AetherSX2 isn’t available in the default core lineup, I had to grab it from the RetroPie Extra repo with these commands:

git clone https://github.com/Exarkuniv/RetroPie-Extra
cd RetroPie-Extra
./install-extras.sh

Once the script had added the cores, it was time to hop onto my Raspberry Pi and manually set up the AetherSX2 package from the Manage Experimental Packages section of the RetroPie Setup option.

To transfer my ripped PS2 ROMs and BIOS files, I enabled the Samba share tool and placed them in their respective folders. Once I’d restarted EmulationStation, AetherSX2 showed up as the PS2 emulator alongside my PS2 library.

The performance numbers are all over the place

Some titles are completely unplayable, while others run surprisingly well

As a fan of the Armored Core series, I started my tests by emulating my favorite title, Another Age. While the game wasn’t unplayable by any means, running it with default settings resulted in lackluster frame rates, especially for an action-heavy title. However, changing the Blending Accuracy from Basic to Minimal did the trick, and the game ran at a modest 55 FPS most of the time.

2D games and JRPGs ran just as well. Persona 3, for example, was perfectly playable – both in the daytime (and nighttime) exploration as well as inside the game's dungeon. Tales of the Abyss ran just as well, and while Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne could hit solid FPS during combat, the performance wasn't all that impressive when traversing the overworld map.

To my surprise, the emulator was able to run Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Silent Hill 2, though the former had some FPS issues inside demanding cutscenes. Likewise, Jak and Daxter was definitely playable, though there were a couple of FPS drops occasionally. Then you’ve got God of War and Ace Combat Zero, which would have been playable with just 2-3 more FPS. Since I’d plugged my Raspberry Pi into the CrowView Note 14, I figured the latter might not be able to supply enough juice to run the games at full speed. But my thesis was proven wrong when the FPS remained the same even after connecting the official power supply to the SBC.

Alas, there were a couple of titles that the Raspberry Pi had trouble emulating. For instance, Burnout 3: Takedown’s frame rates would tank the moment I’d start any race, while Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening barely hit an average of 15 FPS during the first level. Xenosaga didn’t fare any better either, and even with all the optimizations I could pull off, the game never managed to surpass the 8 FPS mark outside of cutscenes. At the far end of the unplayable list is Killzone, which ran so sluggishly that the emulator could barely load the title screen after several minutes!

So, how feasible is a Raspberry Pi-powered PS2 emulation rig?

I'd say… it depends. If all you want to play are turn-based RPGs and aren’t too concerned about missing QTEs due to low performance, I’d say this project is at least worth giving a shot. Likewise, you won’t encounter too many issues getting the less demanding games to run at decent FPS on the high-end Raspberry Pi models.

Heck, I’d go so far as to say that my own setup could’ve been optimized further. Switching from a microSD card to an SSD (preferably an M.2 drive) could’ve resulted in better frame rates. If you’re into overclocking, dialing the core speed up a notch should remove the performance issues from God of War and Ace Combat Zero. But for an emulator that’s no longer in development, being able to run PlayStation 2 titles on the Raspberry Pi is quite a feat!