Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension
Update [Tue 8th Apr, 2025 15:15 BST]: Following our article yesterday, the creator of PSRetroX has come out to clarify that the project has been paused for several months and is “not currently under active development”.
A new message has been added to the GitHub page to clarify this, inviting people “to explore and use the code freely, with no restrictions”:
“Due to recent attention and viral spread, I want to clarify that this project has been paused for several months. It was started as a personal and experimental exploration into low-level C++, and it is not currently under active development. Feel free to explore and use the code freely, with no restrictions.”
Original Article [Mon 7th Apr, 2025 16:30 BST]: If you’ve ever dreamed of playing your favourite PS2 games natively on PC (complete with quality-of-life improvements), then we have some promising news to share.
A brand new project is currently in its early stages over on GitHub, which aims to make the process of reverse engineering and recompiling PlayStation 2 games significantly easier.
PSRetrox was officially announced four months ago by its creator — an Argentinian systems engineering student called Joaquín Lucas Nieto (njoacodev) — on LinkedIn. However, it only recently came to our attention thanks to a social media post from the Brazilian developer behind the Duke Nukem Forever Enhanced mod, Vinícius Medeiros, who stumbled across the project while browsing through GitHub.
Navigating on Github I found a cool project (still in early stages) that’s building a tool that’ll allow the creation of PC versions of PS2 games, similar to the Nintendo 64 and Xbox 360 recompilations
— Vinícius Medeiros (@vinimedeiros.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:41:15.685Z
It follows in the wake of similar projects for the other consoles, like Mr. Wise Guys’ N64Recomp and Hedge-Dev’s XenonRecomp, and is described on the platform as “a C++ application designed to reverse engineer PlayStation 2 games”.
According to the GitHub description, the “primary goal of the project” is to “extract and process game files, enabling native PC ports of PS2 games”, with the application containing a bunch of built-in tools for decompiling and decoding game assets (including 3D model data and audio files), as well as porting “PS2 recompiled .C files to PC.”
It is currently at only 8% completion, according to the developer, but is definitely a project we’ll be keeping an eye on in the future, so be sure to stay tuned for updates.
[source github.com, via bsky.app]
Hailing from Manchester, Jack has a particular fondness for point-and-click adventure games. In the past, he’s written about lost games from studios like Sony Manchester, Genepool Software, and DMA Design, and has made a habit of debunking video game rumours.