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Developers find a way to simulate PS2 games on the new Xbox console

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Developers have made it possible to launch the games from the old PlayStation 2 in Microsoft’s newly released ‘boxes’, the Xbox series X and S. At the moment it’s the only way to revive nostalgia with the new consoles, still inaccessible to Sony’s fifth generation.

Surely many millennials spent much of their childhood and adolescence with video games. Max Payne, Crash Bandicoot, Half-Life, Prince of Persia and God of War were some of the most iconic titles that could be played 20 years ago on the old but reliable PS2.

The video game industry now offers a wide range of platforms and games that are moving towards augmented reality, but sometimes many would like to remember the old days when they spent entire days in front of the TV screen with a joystick in hand.

With Microsoft’s new consoles, the Xbox X and Xbox S, developers found a way to emulate the PS2, that is, to adapt old games to modern hardware. It uses the developer mode that the creators of the ‘box’ allow for an additional fee and an open-source program-emulator called RetroArch, writes the portal The Verge.

Although RetroArch is widely known and can emulate different consoles, its compatibility with previous versions of Playstation to run its games on an Xbox stands out. In turn, Sony’s new console, the PS5 is only natively compatible with its previous generation and to revive the games of the PS2 and PS3 the company offers its PlayStation Now (PS now) cloud gaming subscription service.

The method to simulate PS2 on your Xbox is as follows: you first have to pay a $19 registration fee to be part of Microsoft’s Developer program. Then you have to download the ‘Dev mode activation’ app from the Xbox store. Once the app is installed, you’ll be able to connect to the console using a web browser and add RetroArch’s UWA (Universal Windows App) files. They have a size limit of 2GB, so you won’t be able to launch heavy video games.

The other method is simpler: the trial version of RetroArch that appears as a ‘private app’ can be downloaded from the Xbox store. Players’ emails are then added to a whitelist of devices, allowing you to download the full version of RetroArch with a code to your Xbox. This levels the size limitations of UWA files and makes more games compatible.

It should be noted that Microsoft does not officially recognize this variant and is still a work in progress, but the first results with RetroArch are exciting: despite the limits on file size, PS2 games run at almost the same quality as they had on the original console.

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