PS2 or GameCube: which retro console emulates best?

It may be shocking to realize that the GameCube and PS2 are now considered vintage consoles, but these systems have been around for a quarter of a century. Since their release, it has become easier to emulate their libraries on modern PCs. But which of the two machines offers the best emulation?

For GameCube fans, the current emulator to beat is Dolphin. And for gamers who grew up with Sony’s hit console, PCSX2 is considered the most accurate emulation program. The question of which is superior is a bit subjective, but we’ll get to that shortly. We also need to discuss why GameCube titles are generally easier to emulate and whether using emulators is actually legal.

To make this a little easier to break down, let’s pit the best GameCube emulator against the best on the PS2. When it comes to providing the most accurate retro experiences, GameCube’s Dolphin emulator is generally slightly more favored than PCSX2. To be clear, both emulators have evolved to the point where they run a large amount of libraries from both consoles well on modern PCs and the best gaming laptops. According to OC3D as of 2023, Dolphin can emulate 97% of GameCube games, while PCSX2 can play 99% of PS2 titles.

Dolphin and PCSX2 are free and open source emulators that allow you to play GameCube and PS2 games on Windows, macOS, and Linux devices respectively (Dolphin also works on Android). The main difference between the two when running older games on modern hardware is that it’s slightly easier to emulate titles on Dolphin than on PCSX2, as Dolphin doesn’t need as powerful a GPU as the PS2 emulator.

Fortunately, neither program requires a top-tier video card like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. If you want to experience your favorite titles from the early 2000s on Dolphin in 4K/60 FPS, a graphics card like the RTX 2060 or AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT will do the job just fine. With the somewhat more demanding hardware requirements of PCSX2, you’ll give yourself more headroom with something like an RTX 3060. Emulation requires more powerful hardware than the stock systems due to the overhead involved, not to mention their graphics scaling.

While both emulators are fairly easy to set up, PS2 emulation is trickier due to the delicate makeup of the PlayStation 2’s processor. Sony’s bespoke Emotion Engine was co-developed with Toshiba and built around parallel processing. While this gave developers at the time a lot of flexibility, it also made the PS2 infamously difficult to program. The delicate nature of the Sony machine’s processor made PS2 emulation a bit more difficult than emulating games through Dolphin, as the GameCube uses a simpler IBM “Gekko” processor.

So while it’s close in terms of overall emulation quality, the GameCube’s Dolphin program narrowly edges out PCSX2 due to its less demanding nature.

There are several main reasons why GameCube games are relatively easy to emulate (especially compared to PS2 titles). First, from an architectural standpoint, the GameCube is a less complicated piece of hardware than the PlayStation 2. One of the reasons Dolphin has become the go-to emulator for Nintendo’s sixth-generation console is due to its developer-friendly Gekko processor, which makes game emulation reasonably simple. While the PS2’s aforementioned Emotion Engine processor proved a nightmare for developers, the GameCube’s simple makeup of that IBM PowerPC processor and its ATI “Flipper” GPU has always made emulating games on modern hardware using Direct3D or Vulkan a breeze.

Another major contributing factor to the smoothness of GameCube emulation is that Dolphin has been around since 2003, so programmers have had plenty of time to improve it. It can sometimes take years for emulators to materialize after a console hits the market (remember, the GameCube arrived in late 2001), but Dolphin didn’t have that delay. PCSX2 is also a mature emulator, released in 2002, but it lacks some of the fluidity of Dolphin due to the complexity differences we discussed.

While it’s not the only GameCube emulator, Dolphin has improved rapidly over the years. It even supports Wii games since the two systems are very similar internally. The biggest boon for retro fans was when Dolphin became an open source project in 2008. The move to open source meant that programmers around the world could develop fixes and improvements for the software. With so many people helping Dolphin evolve, improvements such as much higher internal resolutions, expanded controller support, the introduction of anisotropic filtering, and a fix allowing emulated GameCube games to run in 16:9 widescreen rather than 4:3 were quickly added.

Although the software is easy to download, it’s a shame that Dolphin didn’t come to Steam despite its developers’ best efforts.

Despite what Nintendo’s lawyers would have you believe, console emulators are not illegal. Dig a little deeper, and it’s a little more complicated than that. While using emulators isn’t against the law, the methods you use to run software on them certainly can be. If you have, say, a copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wakerand you transfer the game files to your PC via a homebrewed GameCube, you are not breaking any laws.

Of course, the easiest option for many people who haven’t kept their old discs is to download retro game files from online sites. In the vast majority of countries, this is definitely illegal. Even if you own the original game but can’t be bothered to transfer the disc contents to your PC or laptop, you are still guilty of copyright infringement. To recap: using a console emulator is legally safe, but running downloaded game ROMs on an emulator is illegal.