The PS4 can now emulate PlayStation 2 games

If you own a PS4, I have good news: It is now capable of playing PS2 games through emulation. Rather unusually, though, Sony hasn't actually announced anything officially. The PS2 emulator was discovered by Eurogamer when it was sent a new PS4 Star Wars bundle containing three games that originally debuted on the PS2. Eurogamer entered a PSN download key, their PS4 downloaded all of the old games... and then the classic PlayStation 2 logo appeared "in all its upscaled glory."

Following Eurogamer's exposé, a Sony spokesperson then confirmed with Wired that the PS2 emulator exists: "We are working on utilising PS2 emulation technology to bring PS2 games forward to the current generation. We have nothing further to comment at this point in time."

Eurogamer confirmed that these old games—Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter—were being emulated, rather than brought to the PS4 in some other manner. First, when you start one of the emulated games, a system prompt appears telling you that Start and Select have been mapped to the right and left side of the DualShock's trackpad—a feature that isn't available to third-party software running on the PS4. Second, there's a system in place for managing PS2 memory cards, much like on the PS3. Third, the aforementioned PS2 logo appears every time you start a game. And fourth, in-game button prompts are still mapped to the PS2 controller. Indeed, as Eurogamer says, "nothing has been changed at all, effectively ruling out a remaster."

Rather excitingly, the quality of emulation is rather good, too. As you can see in the video above, the PS4's PS2 emulator is running at a much higher resolution than the original PS2. Original PS2 titles usually output at a native resolution of either 512×448 or 640×448. The emulated PS2 games on the PS4, though, appear to have a native resolution of 1292×896, and then a final pillarboxing and upscaling to 1080p. The total pixel count is around 4× the original.

While there's some clever upscaling and post-processing, there isn't much that can be done to the original 2D assets: they still look very similar to how they originally looked at the turn of the millennium. The 3D assets, though, which enjoy a huge boost in resolution and some kind of anti-aliasing effect, look very good.

Frame rates are good, too. In the video above, you can see that the PS4 is emulating the PS2 at a fairly solid 60FPS, while the original PS2 can't get anywhere close to that. These Star Wars games aren't that graphically intensive, though; as Eurogamer notes, it will be really exciting if the emulator can run Metal Gear Solid 3 or God of War at higher frame rates.

The last question, then, is that of Sony's plans for PS2 emulation on the PS4. For now, we just have these three Star Wars games, and a "no comment" from Sony on what might be coming next. Eurogamer speculates that Sony intends to sell these old PS2 games digitally, rather than the Xbox One's approach of letting you use your Xbox 360 game discs. Hopefully Sony will reveal its plans soon.

Listing image by Eurogamer