I play my PS2 collection upscaled to 4K, and some of the games look like remasters

Published Oct 9, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. When the PlayStation 2 came out, I wasn't even born yet. But as a child, I got to experience an era when it peaked in popularity, and everyone at school knew it was the one gaming console you had to have. Some of the classics from that time truly set the stage for the modern gaming industry with vast open worlds, cinematic storytelling, and design choices that still influence what we play today. I've found myself revisiting that library quite often, of course, not without the help of a few modern conveniences. After a few evenings with one of my favorite titles, I'd say there's no better way to revisit the classics than in 4K. All it took was an emulator, a little configuration, and a streaming app to send the feed to the TV. The setup is an emulator and an open-source streaming app PCSX2 does the upscaling, and Sunshine and Moonlight handle the streaming If you're looking to emulate PS2 games on PC, you don't need to go beyond PCSX2. That's true if you're trying to upscale them, too, because the emulator can handle it. PCSX2 can take a PS2 game's 480p output and render it at 2x, 3x, 4x, or even 8x the console's native resolution, which gets you comfortably beyond 4K. For most games, though, the sweet spot is often between 3x and 4x without running into issues or artifacts with UI elements, shadows, or sprites, as I did on my setup with a Ryzen 5 7600X and an RTX 4070 Ti Super. I rely on the Sunshine/Moonlight duo to get that feed onto the TV. Sunshine runs on my PC and captures the PCSX2 output before encoding it, while Moonlight on my Google TV receives the stream over my home network. The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake got canceled, so I made my own in 4K The emulator almost does what Ubisoft couldn't in six years In January this year, Ubisoft canceled its hotly anticipated Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, along with five other projects and two studios, as part of a wider corporate restructuring, dashing the hopes of many nostalgic gamers like me to revisit one of the most beloved titles of the PlayStation 2 era. Six years, an international handover, a full development reboot, and multiple delays later, it is officially never coming out. On a PCSX2 with a 4K display, the art direction is preserved, and it makes you question how little a remake was needed in the first place. The sunlit courtyards, ornate interiors, and the Prince, of course, look just as they did on the platform they came out on, only with added clarity. Instead of replacing the original's vision and ambient atmosphere, the higher resolution only brings more of it into focus, preserving what was meant to be preserved in a classic like this. Silent Hill 3 at 4K is what the HD Collection from Konami should've been The PS2 original scales up and keeps the horror alive In 2012, Konami released the Silent Hill HD Collection on PS3 and Xbox 360, which included Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 with upscaled resolution and reworked voice acting, but this remaster wasn't without its own set of issues. Well, glaring, immersion-breaking issues, to be precise. The critical failure of this remaster is still a subject of discourse in gaming threads, and much of it comes down to how it broke the very things that made Silent Hill so effective. In the HD remaster, cutscenes suffered from desynced audio, textures popped in and out and went missing, and perhaps most disastrously for a game known for its eerie ambiance, the fog effect was badly broken. Fortunately, PCSX2 lets you skip all that and enjoy the classic the way it was intended, without taking away what made the original so memorable. Running the title at 6x internal resolution leaves the atmospheric effects intact, and the fog, and the overarching atmosphere with it, renders the way Team Silent intended. As one of my personal favorites, I cannot think of a better way to revisit the horrors of the Lakeside Amusement Park today. Gran Turismo 4 at 4K is the Gran Turismo PC players never got It already ran at 60fps on PS2, and PCSX2 makes it look ridiculously good Gran Turismo 4 is a title I'd call Polyphony Digital's magnum opus of the PS2 era, and it deserves a special place on this list because it was one of the games that convinced me, as a five-year-old, that I absolutely needed a PS2. More than two decades later, I can play that same game at 6x internal resolution, and it's just fascinating how well the car models and circuits look at modern pixel density. I prefer to play this way because it adds a clarity a CRT in 2004 simply couldn't resolve. Be it sponsor liveries on the race cars, the Michelin boards at the trackside, or the car models through the many replay angles GT4 offers. Despite the 4K resolution, though, I still couldn't find the Loch Ness Monster at Trial Mountain. Who needs remasters anyway? Often, studios chase remasters of old, beloved classics in hopes of attracting newer audiences and, in that pursuit, reconstruct them into something they were never meant to be. It happened with Silent Hill 3, and it could have happened with Prince of Persia. Remasters and sequels have their own audience, and that's a fair ambition in its own right, but for fans here for the nostalgia trip rather than a reinvention, an emulator and a display that outputs a resolution they prefer do more justice than most official remasters ever did.