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Sony's new PlayStation 2 emulator tested - and it's another disappointing effort

Sony is wasting PS5's emulation potential through poor upscaling, disappointing filters and a profound lack of care for its classic PS2 and PSP titles.

For context, the first crop of emulated PS2 classics appeared with the new PS Plus tiers back in 2022, but the games came with major issues that made them hard to recommend, including PAL/NTSC compatibility problems, flawed scaling options and delivery in a PS4 app container. This is most noticeable on UI elements like text, which are the PS2 assets, but stretched (without factoring the anamorphic pixels that would have been used on the original hardware) and scaled with a simple bilinear filter for a fuzzy result. Ultimately, it's hard to accept Sony's efforts when the retro hardware community has collectively solved so many of the issues here - most notably developing a range of genuinely good upscaling methods and filters that you might actually want to use.

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