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The developers have now made it possible to emulate PS2 games on Xbox Series X and S using the RetroArch emulator, something the PlayStation 5, the successor to the PS2, cannot.
Thanks to the “Developer Mode” of the Xbox Series X / S consoles, the emulation software can be added as a Universal Windows App (UWA), allowing users to download a commercial version of the emulation software directly to their console without complicated fixes, so players don’t have to wait for a re-release to play an older favorite.
While RetroArch can emulate a number of different consoles, the support for running PS2 games using the PCSX2 core is particularly notable given how limited Sony’s PlayStation 5 is when it comes to backwards compatibility compared to the Xbox. The new console is only natively compatible with PlayStation 4 games (with a few caveats), and Sony currently only offers the option to play PS3 and PS2 games using its PS Now game streaming service.
It is worth mentioning that Microsoft does not officially support this type of emulation and PCSX2 support is still a work in progress, but the first results with RetroArch are exciting: despite the limits imposed by a limit on the size of the files, PS2 games run at almost the same quality as they did on the original console.
The process to add RetroArch to your Xbox using developer mode is a bit tricky. You will need to pay a $ 19 registration fee to be part of the Microsoft Developer Program and then download the “Developer Mode Activation” app from the Xbox store. Once the app is downloaded and running, you can connect to your Xbox from a web browser using your local network and add the RetroArch UWA files. This UWA RetroArch is severely limited by a file size limit that could prevent it from running games larger than 2GB.
The newer and easier method of doing this, created by the “tunip3” programmer, was first covered by Ars Technica. The Tunip3 method uses a commercial version of RetroArch that is listed as a “private application” in the Xbox Store. By adding player emails to a whitelist, the full version of RetroArch can be downloaded directly to your Xbox with a code. This method removes the file size limitations that come with a UWA developer app, which means more games are supported, at least until Microsoft removes this loophole.
With RetroArch on the new Xbox, there is now strong evidence that emulating these older consoles is possible on next-gen hardware. In fact, Microsoft already relies on an emulator it created to run Xbox and Xbox 360 games on Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S. For PlayStation games, the ball is in Sony’s court and it is not yet clear whether it has intended to offer a formal backward compatibility option on the PS5 that goes beyond cloud streaming.
