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.
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.