AetherSX2 is a PlayStation 2 emulator that runs on Android devices and which early testers have indicated offers strong performance on recent phones with flagship-class chips from Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek.
Now you can try it out for yourself. AestherSX2 Beta is now available for free from the Google Play Store.
Note that this is a pre-release testing build which may still have some bugs to work out. And the developer recommends running AetherSX2 on devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 or later processor for best performance, or a device with similar performance (including four ARM Cortex-A75 or equivalent CPU cores).
While you can run AetherSX2 on slower hardware, games will run more slowly. And if you’re using a device with Mali or PowerVR graphics, for example, the Vulkan graphics API won’t be used, and graphics performance will be lower.
And, as with all PS2 emulators, AetherSX2 does not come with any games and it doesn’t include a PS2 BIOS file, since these are all proprietary, so you’ll need to provide your own.
But the app has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks, and early reports seem to indicate that it runs most games well on flagship-class phones released within the past few years, although not every game will work perfectly on every phone.
via @MishaalRahman and /r/Android
I was actually just looking into the state of PS2 emulation a few months ago, and I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t yet possible on Android. This is great news.
There were already other PS2 emulators on Android, but they were either paid, ran worse, or both. AetherSX2 is free and on day 1 gave better performance for many people than the previous leading paid app.
Yeah, I tried DamonPS2, it barely worked for me. Some games ran at great FPS, but texture glitches made it unplayable.