Emulator developers spend years developing software that never makes money, pursuing arcane programming solutions to get old console games to run on our PCs. The developers of the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin estimated last year that they had done more than $10 million in work over the life of the project, and they are not exaggerating when they say that a similar amount of effort went into the PlayStation 2 emulator project PCSX2, which started two years before Dolphin. has been spent on the project. On Thursday, PCSX2 had its first "stable" release since 2016, bringing together years of development on performance and compatibility into a major release.

A four-year gap may make it sound like PCSX2 has not been in active development, but that is not the case; despite being a very active project, Dolphin has not had a stable release since Dolphin 5.0, which appeared in summer 2016. This is probably not rock solid, as programmers working on both emulators are focused on improvements and additions to the development builds.

New builds are uploaded to the PCSX2 Github page on a daily basis, and there is a lot of talk about "Fixes Robin Hood" and "[skip ci] GSDumpGUI: added context menu for GSdx and internal logs" (no, I am not sure what this means either). Because this kind of change is focused on progress, inevitably something will break, the interface will be in flux, or the new features will not be fully optimized. The downside for players is that we can either gamble on such builds or use older versions of emulators that may be missing years' worth of great additions.

This conundrum makes this PCSX2 release, version 1.6.0, an exciting milestone: the PCSX2 website has a bulleted list of changes over the last few years, but unless you are a software developer, it is difficult to make sense of them. But unless you're a software developer, it's hard to understand what they mean: a GUI overhaul, support for the latest display features like adaptive sync, improved gamepad configuration tools, better support for sprite-based games, and countless core improvements and bug fixes.

With such a plethora of progress reports released in 2019, one can either dig into the nitty-gritty of these improvements or take them for granted as good news: this pair of screenshots of James Bond 007: Nighteye is one game is a good example of the kind of small graphical problems that need individual attention just to get one game to render properly.

Or this one from "Jak 3", the infamous Black Eye problem.

Other fixes are more dramatic, taking the game from unplayable to playable.

It is amazing that so much work can be done just to fix the shadows in games like "Sonic Heroes" and "Big Mutha Truckers," but these fixes bring the emulator closer to a perfect representation of the PlayStation 2.

Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 will not have PS2 backward compatibility, at least for the entire library; the PS4's limited emulation program added about 50 games that can be purchased digitally. In other words, PCSX2 is already the best way to play these older games on modern hardware at a much higher resolution than the PS2 could output; five years ago, I argued that playing these games on a PC was already the best way.

I expect the same to be true five years from now, but hopefully by then there will be a few more stable builds of PCSX2.

You can get 1.6.0 from the PCSX2 website.