Can Raspberry Pi 5 Run A PS2 Emulator? Here's What We Know

With more than 150 million units sold, the Sony PlayStation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all time. The combination of backward compatibility with the original PlayStation and support for DVD movies, while being comparably priced to the standalone DVD players that were available in its early years, made the purchase decision easy. There's a lot of nostalgia for Sony's second console, which extends to playing classic PlayStation 2 games, whether from official PlayStation sources or unofficially, using fan-developed emulators.

One of the most popular ways to put together a dedicated vintage gaming emulation box is to use the Raspberry Pi mini-computer to run those classic games. With its complicated architecture, the PlayStation 2 pushes the Pi to its limits, especially on older versions, but the latest iteration, the Raspberry Pi 5, can emulate the console pretty well, but with some major caveats. For a computer that costs under $100 for a bare board and runs around $150 for a tricked-out kit with a case, cooling, and more, that's pretty impressive. With that in mind, let's take a look at how doable this is on different versions of the Pi and what's needed to pull it off.

Les Pounder of Tom's Hardware writes that although the AetherSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator runs on the Raspberry Pi 4, it runs much better on the newer and more powerful Pi 5. He estimated that the Pi 4 and its "not great" performance in emulating Sony's second console, reached "around 60% of the performance offered by the Raspberry Pi 5." While 2D games might perform OK on the Pi 4, they comprise a small percentage of the PS2's library.

Pounder notes that the emulation still isn't perfect, though. In Tom's Hardware's tests, though "Rez" and "Godzilla: Save the Earth" ran perfectly, "Gran Turismo 4" was unplayably slow. Development of AetherSX2 has been indefinitely suspended, and going by the list of PS2 emulators on the Emulation Wiki, no other ARM-based PS2 emulators have come close to its level of compatibility with original titles. AetherSX2 isn't the only PS2 emulator out there, and the Emulation General Wiki describes PCSX2 as having 99% compatibility with the PS2 library, while AetherSX2 sits at 74%. Unfortunately, PCSX2 is built for X86-based systems and is incompatible with the Raspberry Pi. To get an idea of what that 74% looks like, you should check out the AetherSX2 Community Wiki's compatibility list.