After many long years of development, debugging and testing effort, we have reached a point where PCSX2 runs a great majority of the games, and there are no important issues that could possibly be fixed without requiring major modifications to the emulator.



Because of that (and because we already felt it was overdue), we decided to stop thinking of new things to do for a bit, polish the stability, compatibility and existing features and release the result as the first major version of PCSX2!



There have been tons of changes since the last release, including improvements to Jake Stine's wxWidgets GUI overhaul, cottonvibes' new multithreaded VU core and improvements on the primary plugins.

This release is a big milestone that marks the way to new features and improvements!



Here is an excerpt of the latest changes:



Windows



Core:

Video timing adjustments

microVU fixes for Metal Gear Solid 2 and others

General speedups

microVU speedup

New GIF unit that mimics the real one better

microVU elementary function bug fixed (affecting Valkyrie Profile 2, Radiata Stories and Star Ocean 3)

Implemented Multi-Threaded VU! A new speed hack with almost 100% compatibility with games, using a third core to run the VU1 unit separately

CDVD fixes (Time Crisis boots now)

Added support for progressive scan timings

Path 3 arbitration and timing refinements

Added Finnish, Malaysian, Korean, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese and Polish translations



SPU2-X:

Configurable output volume

Fixes to reverb

Various sound looping fixes

Improved time stretcher

Reverse phase audio quality improved



GSdx:

Fixed RGB mode movie recording

Texture cache change that fixes some black screening games

Implemented NVidia FXAA 3.10, page up key activates it

Better multithreading

Arc the Lad bad fog fix

Fixed shadows in software renderer

Implementation of GSdx "Shadeboost" project (saturation, brightness, contrast settings)

User configurable hacks in the GUI

Fixed flickering in many FMVs

Implementation of GSdx "Cutie" project (various extra CRC hacks)



Lilypad:

Pad state getting stuck with savestates bug fixed



USBqemu:

Revamped it a bit



Linux:



OnePad changes:

New dialog configuration panel

Improved support of various pad (sixaxis)/mouse/wiimote

Added support for more controllers

Added support for pressure-sensitive buttons



GSdx:

GSdx ported for Linux! Based on OpenGL 3.3 with some 4.x hardware independent extensions. Requires OpenGL 4.2 drivers and is still in experimental stages. Don't expect the hardware renderer to run properly, but the Software renderer should be fine.

Added support for configuration and keyboard shortcuts from PCSX2



ZZogl:

Added support for configuration and keyboard shortcuts from PCSX2

Added a GLSL backend to replace CG. Like GSdx, it requires OpenGL 4.2 drivers. Only available with PCSX2 self-compilation.



PCSX2 GUI:

Added thread timing information to see the CPU usage in the status bar

Fix multiple frame/box letters sizing.





In addition to these changes we found a fixed several bugs that could lead to crashes in various situations.

The PCSX2 executable has been built and tested with PGO optimizations enabled so it will be an extra 10% faster over regular SVN builds.



We hope you enjoy this first major version release and have fun playing your games on it!

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Head to the download section!