Iris 0.10 Alpha

[Felipe]

FINALLY A NEW ALTERNATIVE TO PCSX2!​

Commercial games​

Booting a small number of commercial games in-game, and a slightly bigger set of games can boot to the title screen. Most of them do nothing though, an the ones that do usually run way too slow to be playable.

BIOS​

Pretty much all BIOSes I've tried work just fine, even some obscure ones like the Chinese BIOS and the PSX DESR BIOS (more on this later).

It is also possible to specify paths to ROM1 (DVD player) and ROM2 (Chinese extensions, required for the Chinese BIOS).

The only caveat is that none of them render any background graphics when booting, and the little orbs and 3D models. This is probably due to my terrible VU emulation and might be fixed soon.

PSX DESR​

Support for the PSX DESR console is early but somewhat functional. The DESR BIOS plays the boot animation but later fails some sort of diagnostic test. The DESR requires Flash, ATA and MagicGate emulation, which Iris doesn't yet support.

Booting to the XMB should be possible once these features are implemented, and is one of my medium-term goals for this project.

If you want to try it for yourself, you need to dump the BIOS out of your PSX console, then just clone the desr branch, build the emulator and set up the BIOS, ROM1 and ROM2 dumps in Settings > BIOS, or through the command line.

​

Special thanks and acknowledgements​

I would like to thank the emudev Discord server, Ziemas, Nelson (ncarrillo), cakehonolulu, PSI-rockin, noumi and the PCSX2 team for their kind support.

This project makes use of ImGui, gl3w, toml++, Portable File Dialogs and stb_image

Components​

This console is significantly more complex compared to the PS1, here's a rough list of components:

EE (R5900) CPU<br>- FPU<br>- MMI (SIMD)<br>- TLB<br>- DMAC<br>- INTC<br>- Timers<br>- GIF<br>- GS<br>- VU0<br> = Macro mode<br> = Micro mode<br> = VIF0<br>- VU1 (always micro mode)<br> = VIF1<br>- IPU<br> IOP (R3000) CPU<br>- DMAC<br>- INTC<br>- Timers<br>- CDVD<br>- SIO2 (controllers and Memory Cards)<br>- SPU2<br>- DEV9<br>- USB/FireWire?<br>- Ethernet<br>- PS1 backcompat (PS1 hardware)<br> SIF<br>

After more than 7 months of hard work, I'm finally releasing Iris for anyone to try out! It's been a pretty long time and since Iris can now actually run games, I decided it was time to make a release.

Warning

Please bear in mind that Iris is currently VERY early in development and even though it can boot and play games, they will ALWAYS run at very low framerates. The PlayStation 2 is a very complex and demanding console so until I write a JIT and hardware renderer, full speed won't be possible.

Funnily enough, it was only very recently that I fixed a DMAC bug that was keeping a lot of games from booting, and now this opens up a ton of potential to further debug and fix other issues, which may lead to even more games to boot. There's still a lot of work to be done, especially in the optimization department. I'm really looking forward to continue working on this project and advancing PlayStation 2 emulation!

GitHub - allkern/iris: Experimental PlayStation 2 emulator

Experimental PlayStation 2 emulator. Contribute to allkern/iris development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Moloch]

The more the merrier.

 

[Nelson2001]

Hopefully this new PS2 emulator will have a good future as time goes by.

 

[Morgana Veil]

Very cool. Hopefully, you will implement much easier to use cheats than PCSX2.
It's fairly convoluted the way you have to use them. It's not hard mind you, just convoluted

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

I always noticed PCSX2 would have slowdowns and general fuckery with specific games so the more the merrier with PS2 emulation

 

[Felipe]

I always noticed PCSX2 would have slowdowns and general fuckery with specific games so the more the merrier with PS2 emulation

What bother me the most is that pcsx2 got BLOATED with many options most of ppl dont care or will never use. It's the same with Windows... :/

 

[secreto7]

Oh, he finally released it!

I was talking with the dev the other day, and we found that we are from the same city!

Post automatically merged: Jun 24, 2025

What bother me the most is that pcsx2 got BLOATED with many options most of ppl dont care or will never use. It's the same with Windows... :/

While that is true, it has many quality of life now and in some ways is better and easier to use than before, thanks to the GUI rewrite that stenzek did and other things.
Also the default settings are good, and it has a game database that applies automatically the correct fixes.
So you only need to change the settings that you want like the resoution.

Post automatically merged: Jun 24, 2025

Very cool. Hopefully, you will implement much easier to use cheats than PCSX2.
It's fairly convoluted the way you have to use them. It's not hard mind you, just convoluted

I don't know exactly since it's been a time since I used the new PCSX2, but before the overhaul I had to use external programs and convert cheats to make them work.
I think now it has a cheat system and database like Duckstation?

 

[moonbits]

What bother me the most is that pcsx2 got BLOATED with many options most of ppl dont care or will never use. It's the same with Windows... :/

The curse of Sony's over complicated architecture and its reliance on interlacing.

 

[RageBurner]

Hopefully it will have built in deinterlacing.

 

[aquova]

I saw this announcement! Very exciting to have another PS2 emulator. I haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds like it's still fairly early days. I might write up an AUR install script if I have the time.

 

[Varyag]

Oh nice! I love PCSX2, it's my most used emulator by far, and having more options is a great way to improve the emulation quality overall. Multiple people working on multiple different approaches.

 

[secreto7]

Hopefully it will have built in deinterlacing.

That reminded me, the new Saturn emulator Ymir, recently implemented deinterlacing, and there are plans for internal resolution upscaling, GPU hardware rendering and many more in the future.

 

[job32]

Hopefully, it wont make you scan your iris to play the games.

 

[RageBurner]

Hopefully, it wont make you scan your iris to play the games.

If Google dealt with emulators, then it would be like that, probably.

 

[job32]

If Google dealt with emulators, then it would be like that, probably.

How do we know companies like google don't have a hand in any of these start-ups?

 

[RageBurner]

How do we know companies like google don't have a hand in any of these start-ups?

It something is open source you can at least inspect it. Emulators are very gray areas and large companies don't want to cause problems to themselves (although they have been known to misappropriate emulator code in the past).

 

[secreto7]

How do we know companies like google don't have a hand in any of these start-ups?

Well, the dev from this emulator, started it recently as a challenge, to improve his skills, and to play his favorite games.
Several amateur solo devs start like that.
He hasn't any sponsor.

And like RageBurner said.

 

[job32]

Both reasonable comments. Of course it could be open source with no view of any funder in the background. A lot of these mega tech companies supposedly started with 2 young guys tinkering around with hard-drives in a garage. If you buy that, then, I have an underwater watch that turns into a mini submarine at the right pressure.

In saying all that, If this fella is legit, then fair play to him. Don't like the name, biometrics came to mind straight away. It's the world we live in, unfortunately.

Post automatically merged: Jun 25, 2025

Well, the dev from this emulator, started it recently as a challenge, to improve his skills, and to play his favorite games.
Several amateur solo devs start like that.
He hasn't any sponsor.

And like RageBurner said.

Why couldn't he play them on Nethersx2? Just wondering.

 

[secreto7]

Both reasonable comments. Of course it could be open source with no view of any funder in the background. A lot of these mega tech companies supposedly started with 2 young guys tinkering around with hard-drives in a garage. If you buy that, then, I have an underwater watch that turns into a mini submarine at the right pressure.

In saying all that, If this fella is legit, then fair play to him. Don't like the name, biometrics came to mind straight away. It's the world we live in, unfortunately.

Post automatically merged: Jun 25, 2025

Why couldn't he play them on Nethersx2? Just wondering.

I understand all that you say.
You're just being too paranoid.

I met him by chance on the Emu Dev discord, and I found he is a young guy from my city,
he studies Computer Science and how I said before, he's doing this because he likes emulation, tries it as a challenge and development of skills.

Of course he can play on PCSX2, NetherSX2 or another one. But is a satisfaction to boot and play the game for the first time on something you did alone and worked and put effort on doing it.

 

[job32]

I understand all that you say.
You're just being too paranoid.

I met him by chance on the Emu Dev discord, and I found he is a young guy from my city,
he studies Computer Science and how I said before, he's doing this because he likes emulation, tries it as a challenge and development of skills.

Of course he can play on PCSX2, NetherSX2 or another one. But is a satisfaction to boot and play the game for the first time on something you did alone and worked and put effort on doing it.

Fair enough. I don't know anything about him or his project. If he is legit, then more power to him.

 

[ThunderBoy]

GOOD
Im happy with PCSX2 which works great.... but other alternatives are always welcome