Support NeoGAF

[West Texas CEO]

My favorite aspect of the PS2s design is its ridiculous DRAM bus width...

2560 bits !

 

[Deleted member 1159]

it's pretty amazing just how much of sony's playstation success has basically been in spite of itself. not sure i can think of another example of this that's quite as striking...

I’m not sure I’d really put it that way. Sony just prioritized things differently than other manufacturers. PSX had a slow loading CD drive that failed a lot, but that also allowed for less expensive games with flashier cutscenes and voice acting and such at a time where it was really novel. There were a lot of games on PlayStation that weren’t exactly bangers, but it didn’t suffer from the long droughts of no new games that the N64 suffered from.

Everything is always going to be a give and take when you’re designing a product, Sony prioritized some things and…it’s hard to argue with the success they’ve had over the last 30 years

 

[cireza]

PS2 had plenty of years of activity and was, for sure, exploited correctly during its lifespan. Despite a complicated and certainly not straight-forward architecture. The console was selling a ton, so developers had no other choice but to get good at it, and this is what happened.

Still the console with the worst picture quality of its gen, by far.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

"all those 60 fps games"... like two?!

ps2 is the 6th gen console with the largest 60fps library.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

There's more 60fps games on PS2 than Xbox or GameCube or PS3.

Jak & Daxter 1, 2 and 3
Sly Racoon 1, 2 and 3
Ratchet & Clank 1, 2, 3, Deadlocked
Gran Turismo 3, Concept, 4 Pro, 4
Tourist Trophy
Burnout 1, 2, 3, Dominator, Revenge
Sims 1
Ridge Racer V
Tekken Tag, 4 and 5
Virtua Fighter 4 and 4 EVO (will this one fix jagging issue)
Rez
SoulCalibur 2 and 3
Dead or Alive 2
God of War 1 and 2
Devil May Cry 1, 2 and 3
Dynasty Warriors 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Maximo Ghost to Glory
Maximo: Army of Zin
Metal Gear Solid 2
Dark Cloud
Enter the Matrix
Spider-Man
Def Jam Fight for NY
Tony Hawk Underground 1 and 2
Castlevania Lament Of Innocence & Curse Of Darkness
Mark of Kri
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 and 2
SSX 1, SSX Tricky and SSX 3
Crash TwinSanity
Crash Nitro Kart
Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex

And I missing many...

Not mentionning all Sports Games or 2D games isn't?

Enter the Matrix is 30fps on PS2 because it has motion blur and fog

The Bouncer
Evergrace
Armored cor 2
gun griffon blaze
ephemeral fantasia
tony hawk's pro skater 3
Klonoa 2
SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom
Soul reaver 2
007 underfire
onimusha serie
star wars starfighter
Projetc Eden
okage shadown king
Drakan
extermination
timesplitters 1 - 3
suikoden 3
Shinobi
Rygar
Rayman 3
Kill switch
Quake 3 revolution
Half LIfe
SpyHunter
Fur fighters
spy fiction
soldier of fortune
Kya
valkirie profile 2
Bujingai Genji
blood will tell
Viewtfull joe
F1 grand prix challenge (only ps2 has F1 60fps gen)
Transformers.
Toy Story 3
Katamari Damacy
V-Rally 3
Nightshade

 

[consoul]

yes it is true

no it isn't

 

[Lysandros]

I remember an old post that was proposing one of the chips had what looked like aa hardware on it but it didn't work or something. It was a really long time ago. That's all I can remember. Well, maybe it had something to do with dividing numbers. There may have been pictures with it?

Anyone remember this theory?

Yeah i remember reading a developer mentioning the dedicated hardware antialiasing was non functioning due to a giant bug and even official documentation saying something like "the antialiasing hardware doesn't work, do this instead (describing another method)". I am not so sure but i think this was a criterion developer posting on sega16 forums.

 

[PaintTinJr]

PS2 had plenty of years of activity and was, for sure, exploited correctly during its lifespan. Despite a complicated and certainly not straight-forward architecture. The console was selling a ton, so developers had no other choice but to get good at it, and this is what happened.

Still the console with the worst picture quality of its gen, by far.

Sounds like a problem that fits the maxim: "Better one volunteer than ten conscripts.", no? Developers definitely needed encouragement after the Xbox was giving them the easiest path to develop on console - most memory, and a HDD, and effectively a stripped back WinTel PC.

 

[Seider]

Recently has been released a Mario 64 rom running at 60 fps on original Nintendo 64 hardware. This shows that Nintendo 64 was underused in its generation too.

All games in these old consoles could have been better with more time in development and more knowledge of the system.

 

[Panajev2001a]

My favorite aspect of the PS2s design is its ridiculous DRAM bus width...

2560 bits !

… and that was from the page buffers to the Pixel Engines and texture units, those buffers had an even faster connection from the DRAM macros … well over the 48 GB/s the GS was quoted for. A full speed bi-dirextional GIF-to-GS bus and 8 MB of eDRAM would have made it a true beast.

 

[nial]

Yeah but for us in the US & Europe that was 2 months.
So 2001 was it's first year and like you said it was fire!

Which I think it's a kinda unfair comparison, especially since people will also mostly mention Japanese games like Gran Turismo 3 (and 2002 was meh, honestly).
PS2's first year starts at March 2000.

 

[The Stig]

Oh yeah I forgot about the fat PS3. That's the 60gb one right? I might look into getting one of those. Cheers

thats the one. absolutely amazing gadget.

i love mine, ps, ps2 and ps3 in one box

 

[The Stig]

Also GT2 to GT3 A Spec is probably the biggest jump in graphics we'll never see again.

i still remember it blowing me away when i saw it running in a store

 

[Fafalada]

Anyway - back on topic of this thread - I do think the 'wrongly utilized' vs. 'under-utilized' are two very different things.
I have an idea what console takes the top spot on the second bucket - but that's a different thread alltogether... maybe I should start that sometime.

As for the 'wrong' bit - PS2 did have a larger than usual contingent of software that was just plain doing things against the hardware. And that's partly by design - both architecture being very open-ended/flexible (so people have to find their own way), and software being entirely in developer control (no real SDKs or drivers to help you along the way when it came to graphics subsystem).
It's sort of like if NVidia went - 'screw this, you guys write your own drivers' to the PC community - inevitably we'd be having a lot of software doing things just 'wrong' from GPU perspective.

All this being said - I do think there are certain things HW was capable of that just weren't seen much, or showed-off in the most interesting ways.
For instance - taking another platform showcase - Wreckless - the rendering stack was basically built around the very things PS2 excelled at, but by and large, we never got anything quite as - show-offy on the PS2. Admittedly - we never got anything else as show-offy on XBox either - that title was unique in its own right - but still.

Another one being Deferred shading - but that - as I mentioned elsewhere, was utilizing HW in ways it just wasn't quite meant to work, but just happened to be possible. This is the type of things we sometimes see from 8bit platforms 20-30 years later, so who knows, we may yet have some homebrew for it one day.

 

[Mace_Dragon]

I thought this was going to be about the power flip switch in the back versus holding the power button it turn the machine off.

 

[SHA]

Still one of, if not the, GOAT consoles.

It's rare to see haters on that console, seriously, this is impressive.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Not true, it was just different. The rasterization speed of the GS was crazy good, which is why a lot of devs (especially Japanese ones) of that era got into what would later be considered "bad habits" of overusing transparency effects particularly in their VFX systems in order to get a good result.

I'm pretty sure the problems with the PS3 were in many ways due to this thanks to the late adoption of the NV GPU over what was originally intended to be GS2. My suspicion being that the original intent was the have the 2nd CELL's SPU's doing all the T+L work and directly feeding into a fill-rate monster equivalent to the GS.

That is almost exactly what the working prototype was, no second CELL but a Toshiba fabbed GPU with only triangle setup, pixel shading, texturing, and tons of eDRAM while all vertex/geometry processing would be handled by the SPU’s on the single CELL BE.

Honestly, I feel like overall the PS2 was used to its full potential. But that took a long time to be realized because frankly it wasn't an easy machine to optimize for.
If you were a coder around when the original Playstation came out you'd have immediately understood why Cerny's mantra was "time to triangle" for PS4, the original PSX (which was how we were first exposed to it name-wise) was remarkably quick and easy to get code up and running on, and it really massively helped drive uptake.
With PS2 and especially PS3 the learning curve had gotten really steep, with only the most hardcore of coders actually wanting the headache of wrapping their minds around what it took to make those pieces of hardware sing.

Agreed, just thinking that in the future as the race to better and better manufacturing processes dies we will need to go with more and more exotic architectures to get performance out of consoles and even PC GPUs (there is a limit to price even for PC gamers and to power consumption for those beasts too).

Engines provided by first party developers to third party ones like Decima and/or deals with middleware like Unreal Engine will become very very important in that scenario IMHO.

 

[EviLore]

30fps is for scrubs, OP.

 

[Doctor Hades]

I bought a PS2, I believe, at release but it was mostly used as a DVD player and I still continued to play most of my games back then on N64, Dreamcast and, of course, PC. I was always disappointed with the PS2's image quality and remember being pretty shocked at how bad Ridge Racer 5 looked on my Panasonic CRT TV. Even the PS2 port of Dead or Alive 2 looked ugly image quality wise in comparison to the Dreamcast version which I'd been playing on a VGA monitor for months at that point. The PS2 was otherwise a fine console with plenty of good games but I felt its image quality let it down along with the usual sub-par PAL ports with top/bottom borders here in the UK.

 

[RobRSG]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

Shopping list:

• Any PS2 with 1 or 2 Dualshock Controllers
• GBS-Control (Upscaler)
• Good quality Component Cable
• Memory Card

If you want to play games directly from Hard Drive instead of Disc, I can recommend also buying:

• Fat PS2 instead of Any PS2.
• Ethernet Adapter (There are SATA versions with no Ethernet port).
• Harddrive or SATA SSD of your choice, depending on which Ethernet Adapter you chose.
• An extra Memory Card with FreeMacBoot and other tools pre-installed.
• SATA or IDE to USB adapter (to transfer games from your PC)

 

[FewRope]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

I recently set up a PS2 with a 4k monitor through OSSC and the image quality is better than I was expecting, you maybe need to watch a few video to start tinkering but its legit impressive to see PS2 that well on a modern monitor

 

[Madserb2023]

Just imagine how much better the Xbox One would have been if they just utilized that second GPU or the cloud.

 

[T-0800]

… and that was from the page buffers to the Pixel Engines and texture units, those buffers had an even faster connection from the DRAM macros … well over the 48 GB/s the GS was quoted for. A full speed bi-dirextional GIF-to-GS bus and 8 MB of eDRAM would have made it a true beast.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

A software that the community never set out to make was a homebrew Performance Analyzer, as it's the only way to know which games really push the system.
I learned from the community that one way to analyze with the naked eye, without instruments, is to observe the following items
frame rate, resolution and shadows.

Those who are used to the current generation will notice that there is a performance mode and a quality mode, basically for a game to reach 60fps it is necessary to reduce the pixel rate per frame by half. (4k 30fps-> 2k 60fps)
The other alternative is to make a cut in the graphics, reducing geometry, effects and especially shadows, the cut in shadows indicates that there was a lack of juice. In the sixth generation the most common cut was in the shadows. This way, the resolution and frame rate are fixed. The Dreamcast never lowered the resolution in exchange for fps. Re-volt was a beautiful game at 30fps but a 60fps mode could be enabled via code in exchange for reducing draw distance and turning off effects.
On PS2 there is no choice between fidelity and performance, this choice is already made by the developer during production. It's amazing how games like 007 Agent Underfire, GOW2 and Jak 2 run at 60fps with all enemies having shadows.

 

[Tazzu]

The worst part about these discussions are always the Nintendo fans who have to descend in.

 

[Cryio]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

You need to set up the PS2 emulator, PCSX2. It has Progressive Scan patches, Widescreen Patches, 60 fps patches, anti blur patches, anti shaking patches. Not to mention 240p resolution more often than not, which you can change to almost 4K. And today Lossless Scaling for adding 2x or 3x fps Frame Gen to run these games even at 180 fps even after the 60 fps patches.

Games running properly on the emulator do look glorious tho.

 

[Darkmakaimura]

PlayStation 2 is still the best console ever made.

 

[Wildebeest]

Shadow of the Colossus was a 20fps game when anything was happening. It was a great looking and playing game for the time, but anyone who couldn't feel the PS2 engine chug like an asthmatic model-t was lying to themselves.

 

[awwr999999]

I mean, there are almost certainly things you can do today on PS2 with modern software that you couldn't do (performantly) 20 years ago. That's how software evolution works. The same is true for every console.
Check out some of the modern N64 engines, for example. They blow what was available back then out to of the water.

More than anything the question is what an AAA PS2 game made with modern software looks like.
What can your AAA studio do with 8.5GB worth of PS2 game, no patches, no updates ever?
No apologies, it ships perfect the first time. Controversial games will stay controversial forever.
Rockstar, Konami, Capcom, Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, Kojima - all having the exact same constraints and 'limitations'.
That irresistible draw will steal the focus away from newer x86 platforms and the quick game development times will keep developers hooked.
The challenge of competing against other studios on a level playing field will lead to better games and a 2nd golden era of gaming.
All it will take is Rockstar shipping a brand new PS2 exclusive GTA for the same $50 that GTA3 sold for 20 years ago.

The eDram was also an issue, since it was small (4MB for Graphics memory, the Dreamcast had 8MB) and despite being fast, developers couldn't make use of its bandwidth except for certain exclusives.
It's not so much being difficult to program for, the main issue was it was too different compared to the competitor consoles, and the PC Market. Porting a game meant having to resign it to make use of the PS2's hardware.
It was a crazy but amazing console, something we probably won't see again.

Sony's had an updated EE with 32MB eDram since 2000 but for obvious reasons they couldn't change PS2 HW.
Having an affordable platform that's different from PC is exactly what Sony needs now more than anything.
We'll see the PS2 again because Sony needs to have the World's best selling console and the only way to beat PS2 is with a better PS2.
It's likely the easiest way Sony can win back Japanese gamers and overtake Switch as Japan's favorite console.

Remember Cerny said the PS5 made games easier to to make and the turn around was faster then even the PSX.....
Even going as far to say a developer could work 3.5 years on a game and would get better results with 2 years on the PS5
yeah.....what the fuck happened there

Cerny's points make no logical sense - PS1/2 are the obvious sweet spots for fastest game dev times at the lowest prices.
IIRC, typical dev time for AAA PS1 games is something like 1 year and PS2 is 2 years. Teams making AAA PS2/1 games are a fraction of the size needed to make a AAA PS5 game.

What I would agree with is the idea that the PS2, especially against today's tooling and knowhow, or PS3's tool improvements, could have had a much cleaner image in polygon rendering/texturing and better results than it did, even in first party games like Ico - which was originally built for PS1 IIRC. - and much more so than its 6th gen main competitors - xbox/GC which were more tapped out with their best efforts in transforms/fillrate/shading IMO, so wouldn't gain as much improvement from today's tooling, IMO.
...gave rise to super successful middleware engine RenderWare by Criterion...

Sony needs a platform where Unreal isn't running the show while reducing studio profits by 5% and compelling studios to publish their PS games on Epic's store for a 1.5% kickback.
Sony could either buy or reverse engineer RenderWare and modernize it to make the world's best PS2 middleware engine. Making this PS2 engine available to developers for free would effectively be adding a 5% bonus to their earnings by making Unreal unnecessary while stopping games from becoming ubiquitous across x86 platforms. Sony owning PS2 development from the get-go would make it a platform built on PS2 exclusives where Unreal would never be able to catch up and syphon away games and profits.

PlayStation 2 is still the best console ever made.

Upside is that Sony can make the PS2 better by adding a wired (DS2 plug-in) DualSense and Pulse3d headphone compatibility.
Upgrading to sata III, and adding an SSD (even just a HDD) could drop load times to less than what we're used to for PS3/4/5 games.

 

[Shadowstar39]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

Component cable is what I use but my TV is 1080p with a ton of inputs (modern 4k tvs seem to lack stuff like component). Or you can do what I do with the wii, hdmi adapter it's like 10 to $15 on amazon and was a game changer. My wife had the wii setup with composite cables through a dvd/vcr
. It was blurry mess. Bought the adapter and bam it's night and day difference.

The problem with the ps2 is that not every game is 480p. Some you need to hold a key to get that mode or a menu. Or some, I think gt4, only has higher resolution on races, not menu.

It's a great console though. Didn't have one until 2009 after owning a ps3 for a few years I was pc only during the 6th Gen so I had to catch up. Luckily games were $5 a pop for ps2 in 2009.

I recommend, the following that aren't on modern systems, Simpsons hit and run, wizardry tales of forsaken land, burnout 3, gt4, Toca, Suikoden tactics 3-5, star ocean, mortal kombat armegeddon, mortal kombat shaolin monks, soul calibur 2&3, ace combat 4&5, guitar hero 1-3, Metallica, 80s, world tour (if you got a guitar), champions of norath 1&2, castlevania lament and curse of darkness, gow 1 & 2, sly Cooper and jak trilogies, ratchet, rouge galaxy, devil summoner, xenosaga, silent hill 2, 3, 4 ans shattered memories (good luck find them cheap), shadow hearts, tenchu wrath of heaven, prince of persia sands of time trilogy, gta 3 trilogy, and tons more.

 

[BlackTron]

This thread was bumped by a drop-dead-serious post insisting an improved PS2 is guaranteed to return to save Sony...

 

[Hawk The Slayer]

PS2 is still the best console ever. So many good games on it even the lesser known games.

GTA 3 - never played it but know it's a awesome game
GTA Vice City
GTA San Andreas
Xenosaga
Xenosaga 2
Silent Hill 3
Xenosaga 3 - never played it but heard it was awesome
Final Fantasy X
Star Ocean Till the End of Time
Ratchet and Clank Going Commando
Ratchet and Clank Up your Arsenal
Ratchet and Clank Deadlocked
Extermination
Resident Evil Code Veronica X
Resident Evil Outbreak
Resident Evil Outbreak File 2
Oni
Shining Tears
Gungrave
Soul Reaver 2
Half Life -
Timesplitters 3 Future Perfect - Own this on the XBOX but I only found out about this game when my friend bought his PS2 version to my house first.
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Sold 3

And that's not even including all the other good games that I never played or wasn't into like GoW, Jake and Daxter, Shadow of the Colossus, Killzone, fighting games etc.

 

[bundylove]

Silent hill 3 had the best textures and the suffering and primal had some similar effects to bump mapping or shadders

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

I don't see why that particularly matters when you consider the end result. Games looked great overall and ran well. If that's what inefficiency got us, I'd gladly toss today's "efficiency" in the dustbin.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

60 is better than 30.

Local Joke.

 

[TGO]

Cerny's points make no logical sense - PS1/2 are the obvious sweet spots for fastest game dev times at the lowest prices.
IIRC, typical dev time for AAA PS1 games is something like 1 year and PS2 is 2 years. Teams making AAA PS2/1 games are a fraction of the size needed to make a AAA PS5 game.

Resident Evil 6 had a Dev Team of over 600
Resident Evil 7 had a Dev Team of 120
Final Fantasy 8 had a Dev Team of 180
Alan Wake 2 was done by a team of 130
The Last of Us Pt II was done by 400 and outsourced to over 2000 developers across Playstation Studios
The latest Assassin's Creed is being made by over 2000 people across Ubisoft.

Sizes of teams have definitely increased and some are in the thousands but it varies from game to game and doesn't reflect the quality.

 

[polybius80]

Silent hill 3 had the best textures and the suffering and primal had some similar effects to bump mapping or shadders

bump mapping its a term with not an accurate definition in that era, there are some prebaked texture details that were called bump mapping but it usually refers to emboss bump mapping which every console at the time used in some games, there is also normal mapping which is more advanced as it has the highlights in objects with per pixel light but was commonly referred as "bump mapping" too, normal mapping was almost exclusive of xbox , in ps2 there are games that use normal maps like matrix path of neo and hitman blood money but not much else outside xbox, but there were games that mixed other effects with very good results like environment map with emboss bump maps or using the per vertex highlight along emboss bump maps in ps2 and gc, silent hill 3 also uses bump mapping(emboss) along other crazy effects

there are plenty of "shader like" effects made with very clever ways of using the capabilities of ps2

 

[nkarafo]

In what way a 30fps game is better than a 60? More graphics? Is that what makes them better?

 

[Kerotan]

I read your title and was gonna say MGS2/3 but I seen you already mentioned that.

 

[MAX PAYMENT]

It seemed like the ps2 had a pretty low barrier of entry to make games for. The amount of good AA games out there on the console was wild, even if they barely used the hardware correctly. I'd love for the AA business model to make a comeback.

 

[Lysandros]

My favorite aspect of the PS2s design is its ridiculous DRAM bus width...

2560 bits !

That takes crazy Ken at its peak. I would love to see modern bolder Playstation systems to focus on bandwidth once again, but this doesn't seem to be the direction that they are going. With no 'Ken' around, the masses dictate the machine, bandwidth is more difficult to market than teraflops. Look at PS5 PRO, they didn't even have the balls to put (a rather moderate) 624 GB/s pool to the machine to save a few dollars more in BOM. Bandwidth to raw GPU ratio is way loopsided in current systems which drop efficiency/real world throughput like a stone.

 

[StereoVsn]

What a thread bump. And man, that 20-30 fps better than 60 comment is just something else.

Anyways, PS2 is actually a fairly difficult beast to display on modern TVs. Game resolution can range from 240p to 480i to 480p … sometimes different modes within a single game. Cheap HDMI cables do not perform well.

Best methods are HDMI hardware mod (quite difficult to do), owning a decent CRT or utilizing a higher end upscaler like Retrotink 5 (or equivalent). And then on top of that use software mod on PS2 that allows widescreen patches and forcing games into 480p (not universally possible).

 

[Parazels]

Sony's consoles always had prominent flaws before PS4.
Even PS4 had a flaw - loud turbine.

 

[Radical_3d]

Resident Evil 6 had a Dev Team of over 600
Resident Evil 7 had a Dev Team of 120
Final Fantasy 8 had a Dev Team of 180
Alan Wake 2 was done by a team of 130
The Last of Us Pt II was done by 400 and outsourced to over 2000 developers across Playstation Studios
The latest Assassin's Creed is being made by over 2000 people across Ubisoft.

Sizes of teams have definitely increased and some are in the thousands but it varies from game to game and doesn't reflect the quality.

PS5 is easier and faster to develop but that doesn’t mean all the game is. When your character is 25 polygons is way faster to produce than a 25 million polygons, with textures and shaders for sub surface scattering, peach skin and physically accurate hair. Is not that hard to understand. The middlewares are promising faster developing times but those cost money and many of them, like UE5, are optimised like ass.

 

[Lysandros]

Sony's consoles always had prominent flaws before PS4.
Even PS4 had a flaw - loud turbine.

Besides slow CPU and storage speed. Every system can be said be flawed in some ways regardless of the brand. But it was remarkably well balanced in regards to compute/bandwidth/fill rate ratios with plenty of GPGPU capabilities to aid the CPU in physics department. There lies the secret of its longevity besides its selling success i think.

 

[Deerock71]

[Eagerly awaits Silent Hill 2 shot of nodding man...]

 

[Parazels]

Besides slow CPU and storage. Every system can be said be flawed in some ways regardless of the brand. But it was remarkably well balanced in regards to compute/bandwidth/fill rate ratios with plenty of GPGPU capabilities to aid the CPU in physics department. There lies the secret of its longevity besides its selling success i think.

They couldn't set better (and/or more expensive) CPU in 2014, so it's not a flaw.

Also I personally didn't lack storage.

 

[Lysandros]

They couldn't set better (and/or more expensive) CPU in 2014, so it's not a flaw.

Also I personally didn't lack storage.

I meant storage speed. As to CPU they could at least clock it ~150-200 MHz higher with a more robust cooling solution. Same with GPU clock speed, it was way too conservative at 800 MHz. Those aren't necessarily important "flaws" though, i agree there.

 

[NeverYouMind]

What a thread bump. And man, that 20-30 fps better than 60 comment is just something else.

Anyways, PS2 is actually a fairly difficult beast to display on modern TVs. Game resolution can range from 240p to 480i to 480p … sometimes different modes within a single game. Cheap HDMI cables do not perform well.

Best methods are HDMI hardware mod (quite difficult to do), owning a decent CRT or utilizing a higher end upscaler like Retrotink 5 (or equivalent). And then on top of that use software mod on PS2 that allows widescreen patches and forcing games into 480p (not universally possible).

I was under the impression that playing on original PS3 hardware was the best option. Upscaling looked pretty good on the few PS2 Classics that I tried on a slim and that was just software emulation.

P.S. I want a PS2 Pro so bad...

 

[StereoVsn]

I was under the impression that playing on original PS3 hardware was the best option. Upscaling looked pretty good on the few PS2 Classics that I tried on a slim and that was just software emulation.

P.S. I want a PS2 Pro so bad...

PS3 OG with full BC would be pretty good. The issue is they are notoriously unreliable without a lot of work, and I am not talking Thermal paste.

You can fix some of the issues but you better know your way around soldering iron or lay a lot of $$$ to someone who does. Plus the cost of OG PS3.