PS2 Emulator to run on Linux and L4T Lakka Released
Without a doubt, a console that many people dream of emulating on their portable devices is the PlayStation 2.
As it stands, emulating it requires a fair deal of power but that didn’t stop GBATemp user ‘uyjulian‘ from attempting to run Play!, a PS2 emulator, on his Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, the results weren’t exactly great as it’s been noted that
- Xenosaga Episode 1 runs at around 10FPS but he says that future speed-ups might increase the framerate to 30FPS
- It’s important to note that the game runs at 20FPS on a PC (of unspecified specifications) so it may be Play!’s fault.
- Another GBATemp user noted that Devil May Cry 3 ran at 10-20FPS which was said to be a somewhat playable experience
- The above results were obtained with aarch64 JIT enabled which means that the emulator needs a lot of optimisations for any PS2 games to ever run well on the Switch
- Apparently, the joycons don’t work and you need to overclock your Switch to the maximum frequency to get anything more than a slideshow which may not be safe to do in the long-term
As a result, it’s safe to say that full-speed PlayStation 2 emulation won’t be a thing on the Switch anytime soon but maybe, just maybe, some less-demanding games will be somewhat playable if Play! sees a lot of progress and speed-ups in the coming years!
On the other hand, an L4T (Linux 4 Tegra) version of the Lakka Linux distribution,which is aimed to be used with RetroArch emulation, has been released. This release, which shares numerous similarities with the recently-released L4T Ubuntu, has the following improvements over previous Lakka Switch releases:
- Audio works through the headphones and internal speakers
- The GPU driver now supports Vulkan
- RAM is locked at full-speed which is 1600MHz as opposed to 800MHz before
- Numerous stability improvements and the addition of Yaba Sanshiro (Saturn), Reicast (Dreamcast), mupen64plus-next and others.
- The Dolphin core got Vulkan support which means that some titles, like Rayman 3, are now playable at full speed!
