A PS2 emulator for ARM64 devices
ARMSX2 2.9.1 is a release of the open-source PlayStation 2 emulator based on PCSX2. It emulates PS2 hardware on ARM64 phones, PCs and gaming handhelds, with the project listing Android, Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS and iPadOS as target platforms. Its native ARM recompilers are intended to improve performance while retaining PCSX2’s emulation work.
The release was published on October 28, 2026. Android packages are available for several SDK generations, along with Linux ARM64 AppImage builds for systems using either 4K or 16K memory pages. A BIOS dump from a legitimately owned PS2 console is required to use the emulator.
Discord now identifies the game
When the new activity option is enabled, Discord can show the emulated game instead of ARMSX2 as the currently played title. A session with Shadow of the Colossus, for example, can appear as “Playing Shadow of the Colossus,” while the activity card retains ARMSX2 branding and the game’s cover artwork.
To keep the previous “Playing ARMSX2” status, turn off “Show the game in my status” on the Friends screen. Both this option and the new display setting are translated into all 19 languages supported by the application.
New controls and fixes for rotated displays
A new Vulkan option called “Disable Swap Chain Pre-Rotation” appears under Fixes. It restores the pre-2.9 behavior that passes display rotation back to Android, providing a troubleshooting option for devices with sideways-mounted screens.
The release also corrects television-style shader problems on rotated displays. Scanline, diagonal, triangular and Lottes CRT filters now align with the game image on devices such as the AYN Odin 3 and Retroid Pocket G2. Lottes CRT mode also shows the full picture when the game is positioned away from the center, including near the top of a portrait-oriented screen.
Caching changes target slower SD cards
Each game’s shader cache and VU program cache are now stored together in a pack file. The data is loaded into memory when a game starts and saved in the background every 30 seconds. According to the release notes, this keeps play, save-state loading and quitting smooth even when the emulator is using a slower SD card.
The per-game arrangement also preserves each title’s VU cache when switching between games, rather than treating the cache as one shared pool.
Recompiler work focuses on Shadow of the Colossus
The EE recompiler now generates more optimized native code through JIT compilation and reduces the number of interrupts. The release specifically identifies Shadow of the Colossus as a beneficiary of this work.
Shadow of the Colossus remains intentionally limited to 30 frames per second through its game-database configuration. The release notes explain that the game can otherwise alternate between 60 and 30 frames per second, creating uneven motion, while the 30-fps setting keeps it running at full speed. The override can be disabled through the GameDB settings, although the project recommends leaving it enabled for this game.
The optimized build’s profile-guided optimization profile was retrained on the 2.9.1 code across 16 games, including the renderer. This updates the profile used by that build to reflect the current code.
More accurate timing and VU behavior
Several CPU operations now use cycle counts measured on real PS2 consoles. The changes cover division, square-root operations, the FPU accumulator and the console’s 128-bit multimedia instructions, with measurements taken from SCPH-30001 and SCPH-90000 hardware.
VU0 clamp modes from the game database now also apply to multiplies inside COP2 macro instructions, matching the behavior already used by microVU. The release identifies Another Century’s Episode 3 as playable with this correction.
Game-specific settings load correctly after updates
ARMSX2 fixes a startup race that could affect the first launch after an update. Previously, the game database could be queried before the emulator was ready, leaving it empty for that session. Games would then run without the per-game fixes ARMSX2 normally applies until the application was restarted.
The corrected initialization waits for ARMSX2 to be ready before loading database settings. This restores overrides such as the 30-fps behavior for Shadow of the Colossus when starting the emulator after an update.
The release also adjusts the database entries for Tekken 5 and Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection running on System 256. Both now use the Force Bilinear upscaling specified by their database entries, which keeps backlit spheres round.
