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I skirt a fine line with emulators, I only download games I cannot play normally (I.E. Mother 3) or games I/friends of mine own/used to own (NHL 95, chrono trigger). My cousin uses emulators to preview sega games and decided whether or not to buy them from our local pawn shop. I disagree with them and their games being illegal, as the only emulators I mainly use are ones that don't make money for their respective companies anymore, but I'm not going to whip up a brouhaha over the legality of distributing digital copies of games that've been around since Tutankhamen invented the first pong table.
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many of the games I emulate are games I purchased in the past and no longer have. Other than that they are games for systems that would just cost too much to get or too much hassle to bother looking for.
and I use a moded 1st gen xbox to play everything from PSone/N64 and before. I do still buy PSone games if I find black labels at decent prices.
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Here's a showcase of PCSX2 and how great it can make tons of PS2 games look :p
PCSX2 Videos (remember to select the highest video quality!)
The site also has some compatibility stats, and there are currently nearly 2000 games that are fully playable. Fully playable means being able to play through all the content without encountering glitches that makes it impossible to continue. Even if a game has some obvious glitches, it still falls under this category if it doesn't stop you from finishing it. Most of the time, such glitches will only be minor graphical glitches, though. For example, certain shadows or textures may flicker or look bad in some areas.
A lot of games have close to no glitches. Persona 4 is nearly flawlessly emulated, and I can count the number of areas with a tiny bit of texture flickering on one hand. FF10, 10-2 and 12 are also very well emulated. The emulator also supports the multiple degrees of pressure sensitivity of Dualshock 3 face buttons if you set it up right.
The emulator does require a sort of beefy computer to run certain games, though. Some games are a lot easier to emulate than others. FF10 10-2 and 12 are very easy to emulate (full speed at a 2.7GHz core 2 CPU), while tekken 5 and SC3 requires a reasonably powerful CPU, such as an i5 at 3.5 GHz.
