18 years ago, Sony launched what would become one of the biggest icons in the gaming industry, the PlayStation 2. The level of popularity of the console is still unmatched to this day, and it remains at the top spot as the best-selling gaming platform of all time.
Perhaps because of that tremendous popularity, Sony kept the PlayStation 2 around for a long time. It was only in 2013 – not long before the PlayStation 4 made its way to the market – that the company decided to stop manufacturing it. Now, it’s time for the final nail in the coffin. After a whopping 18 years of providing support and repair services, Sony Japan will no longer service consoles that arrive at the PlayStation Clinic after September 7. Back in June, the company had warned customers that they would have to make any support requests before August 31, and it seems that this is the last week for consoles to be serviced.
I hope my bright pink PlayStation 2 Slimline doesn’t break down any time soon.
fortunately emulation of ps2 is good enough at this point.
Emulation is useful when the real hardware is rare, expensive or unreliable. AFAIK the Playstation 2 is none of those. Just go down your local goodwill and pick one up for $15 and save yourself the many hours of headaches configuring your emulator.
They will be from now, since repairs will no longer be happening.
I can still buy a 3DO on amazon that works just fine, I think the PS2s are safe for a while.
there are repair manuals mostly for fuse replacements. and tons of 3rd party accessories for the console so you are safe there.
but if something else on the mainboard dies, well you might be out of luck.
older units are more fragile electrically, they might go out first.
Or just stack 10 of them in the corner of your closet like i did… they can be had for $5 at yard sales where I live. I’ve got a nice selection of both fat and slim models, and tons of games.
Graphic enhancements + not having to stand your ass from the computer chair are good enough reasons to emulate.
Edited 2018-09-06 20:26 UTC
Some of us dislike “graphic enhancements” – I adore the rough look of PS1 games for example, its dithering and so on, for me it’s much more pleasing than textures turned into soap; but there seems to be no maintained PS1 emu focusing on accuracy of graphics…
Is it really? I didn’t realize they’d gotten that far along. Of course, there’s a Wii U emulator that seems to work pretty well, so this really shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Too bad vibration is usually kinda neglected by emulators…
It doesn’t really matter as long as the chips are ok, and they can make a decent hard drive/memory card loader for the PS2. Plenty of units out there and if you can avoid using the laser to load and play games they can last for decades without issue. 3DO has a similar circuit for loading games from a hard disk and the Saturn was recently cracked to do something similar. Replace the caps and maintain your console and it’ll last generations.
Edited 2018-09-05 20:51 UTC