Drunk Together at Last!


GiGaHeRz did it!! *hic* *wobble*...erm, oh I´d best explain I suppose!

DEV9 is a section of the PS2 which handles a variety of things; HDD, USB and ethernet. GiGaHeRz has been working on one aspect of DEV9, ethernet!

PCSX2 now supports PS2 ethernet, so what does that mean? ONLINE PLAY BABY. On August 30th 2007 GiGaHeRz successfully logged on to the official Capcom Monster Hunter servers and entered a town, briefly after his success I to logged in and joined him!

Subsequently most of the betatesting and development team have logged onto Monster Hunter, interacted with people playing on their real PS2´s and even gone questing with each other; including other Monster Hunter players.

This is a significant moment for PCSX2, as we are perhaps one of the first emulation projects to ever let the emulator user connect to a real live official server and play their game online. The only other project we are aware of; that has even come close to this feat would be nullDC (a Dreamcast emulator for Windows).

Testing is ongoing with a variety of online games, and the lack of USB keyboard and mouse support (hopefully to be resolved soon), means PAD typing messages is the only way to communicate online.

This advance towards emulating some of the more "unique" features of the PS2 has once again put into sharp focus the need for you to dump your own BIOS. The specifics I won´t detail here, however those of you downloading your BIOS will suffer the consequences.

We shall let you know of further progress with any games we get to go online, but Monster Hunter is a fantastic example of how well PS2 emulation can work, average framerates of 50-70 FPS, with lows of 35 in intense moments. Monster Hunter is utterly stable, I myself have been playing it for some time only noticing minor visual issues on rare occasions.

So here for your pleasure is a video of us just saying hello, and 80 (both general and online) screenshots!...now if you don´t mind, we´ve got alcohol to consume *hic*