Emulation

Recently I've been playing around with PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator. It's really a neat little program. The Ps2 was notorious back in the day for being difficult to program for due to its complex architecture, so the amount of work that must have gone in to make this emulator even remotely functional must have been immense. It's not perfect by any means, however. There are often little graphical and sound glitches while playing, and you can't just play any game you like on it ( yet ).

According to the website, there are 830 games out of 1912 that are playable on the emulator. Luckily, one of these games is Final Fantasy XII. I never got very far into FFXII when I owned a PS2, despite that fact that it's a great game. But thanks to PCSX2 I'm already a few hours into a new game of it. Another bonus of the emulator is being able to play games in high resolutions with texture filtering and anti-aliasing. I'm playing FFXII at a resolution of 1920 x 1200, as opposed to the PS2's native resolution of 640 x 400. It looks incredible! Seriously, the graphics are so sharp and detailed, with absolutely no aliasing.

Oh, and I'm playing this legally, by the way. I'm using an ISO of FFXII that I ripped myself from my own copy of the game. Legal emulation FTW!