With the help of AI new updates to PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast emulation are giving a new lease of life to some of the best games ever made

If you lived through some of gaming’s halcyon golden days of the late 1990s and early 2000s – a simpler time when you didn’t need to connect your bank account to a game in order to play it properly, you were fortunate enough to play some absolute blinders. If you didn’t live through the period, you owe it to yourself to have a look.

While many games may have been designed as shorter, dip-in-and-out experiences there were also so many RPGS and adventure games that could still, back in the day consume 100s of hours of your time.

Until relatively recently the best way to experience all of these gaming treasures was to indulge in a bit of eBaying and buy yourself the original hardware and play it on that. This brought up issues in display compatibility and overall stability of aging hardware but it was still the best way to play them as there were too many compromises playing emulated versions.

Then, the world got in on the craze, and greedy money-grabbers started jacking up the prices of original hardware and games and fleecing those who were truly interested. You could be paying a couple of hundred dollars for an old console that was listed as “for parts or not working”, depending on what machine you wanted.

Getting hold of certain games was a nightmare as well. Any degree of rarity saw the starting price move to ridiculous levels. For many people, emulation became the only way to experience these great games.

But what if, as time has passed using emulation is now the defacto best way to play old games on certain hardware because your PC can now improve them in ways that were never envisaged by the original programmers? Do we still need to line the pockets of eBay scalpers? Do we f.., er no.

Our story about how PlayStation 2 emulation is now so good you don’t need the original hardware went viral and helped show many people that the games they played as kids could now be played on a PC, made to look 10 times better with the help of texture packs, and, most importantly, it was easy to do.

There remains that grey area about emulating older games. As much as nobody makes money off them anymore and as easy as it is to find somewhere to download a ROM of the game you are looking for, ethically and legally, you do need to own a copy of the original game.

Much fun can be had revisiting your old games – far more I would argue than downloading the entire console’s library on a torrent and ending up with 900 games you aren’t interested in.

Looking good

One of the first things you should do if you want to emulate games from the PS2/Dreamcast era is look into upscaled texture packs.

Modders are, as we speak, upscaling textures to 4K and beyond and replacing them in your favorite games – we looked at this with SSX Tricky on the PS2. What used to be a tedious job performed by people with hardcore Photoshop knowledge is now being taken on by more and more people. Now you do not need to be a graphic artist to contribute as they are using AI to help them quickly and efficiently upscale the textures.

While many of us can do those using an Upscaling program such as Topaz Gigapixel some modders are now training their own AI image tools and letting them run wild and the results are jaw-droppingly good – on a par with graphics we see in modern games, but with the gameplay and replayability of the golden era.

Sure Sega is looking at rebooting Crazy Taxi as a live-service game that will have monetization in it, but if you can get the OG Crazy Tazi looking like it was released yesterday, why bother?

Downloading some of these texture packs for emulation can take a couple of GB on your hard drive – when you think that most of the games came on a DVD or even a CD originally that is a bit crazy. Check out the above Crazy Taxi remake for the difference it can make to a game however.

Things such as widescreen hacks help take up all that new display real estate we have these days. Controller support is spot on (unless we are talking N64 as that is a controller difficult to replicate)

Playing PS2 games in PCSX2 or Dreamcast games in Flycast with texture packs that have been lovingly crafted (okay, in AI but you know what I mean) not only brings back the memories of the games you used to love but elevates them to such a level it kind of makes many modern games, well, a bit pointless, and highlights them as the consumer-milking gold-mines that they are.

While games publishers do everything they can to keep control of new games so they can just delete them from existence whenever they like, the emulation and modding communities continue to show what is possible when you let the people the games were originally designed for – the gamers themselves – look after the heritage.