The Series S is basically a budget emulation box powerhouse.
This probably isn’t much of a surprise for followers of Modern Vintage Gamer over on YouTube, but it turns out that the Xbox Series S (and by extension, the Series X) can run PlayStation 2 games, and reasonably well, at that, though it requires some doing.
Late last month, he put out a video detailing just how much could be done wit RetroArch on the Series S, and how (comparatively) easy it was to install the software. Long story short: for $299 (plus an extra $20 to activate Dev Mode), you’d be hard-pressed to find a better emulation box overall.
But little more than a week later, the pot got a lot sweeter. Because in that time, an early core build for the PlayStation 2 was added to the UWP build of RetroArch. As MVG goes over in the video, it’s not currently easy to get PS2 games running properly, but that’ll get better over time. But what’s there, once configured properly, runs pretty well.
Notably, the performance of Okami and Shadow of the Colossus are impressive; both were late additions to the console’s library, and pushed things to the limit (my PS2 practically crapped itself inside out on Okami‘s end credits sequence). Most of the rest MVG tested have a few flaws with textures and shadows and the like, but the majority ran without framerate drops. Modern Vintage Gamer goes over all of it in his video (and better than I can; he does this for a living, after all):
There are a few other little pitfalls (namely, the current limitation of game roms needing to be less that 2GB to run), but it’s all increasingly impressive. Especially considering that this is still basically a beta build of the PCSX2 core.
Coincidentally, I’ve been a fan of Modern Vintage Gamer for a while, and his videos are consistently informative on the subjects of emulation and hardware/software security. You should definitely check out the rest of his channel.
Source: IGN
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