PCSX2-Wii: The PS2 BIOS Menu Is Alive — Alpha Coming Soon!
Hi GBAtemp!For the past eight months, I’ve been working on PCSX2-Wii, an experimental project exploring PlayStation 2 emulation on the Nintendo Wii.
My original goal was simple: get the real PS2 BIOS running. Before worrying about games or playable performance, I wanted to see the Sony startup screen and eventually reach the familiar OSDSYS menu — Browser and System Configuration.
After months of reading code, debugging, testing, and working through countless problems, that milestone has finally been reached. The BIOS renders its menu, and navigation into the Browser and back has been tested.
Development screenshot from the native test build.
Seeing that blue animation and those familiar menu options appear after so much work was an incredible moment for me.
This has been a long learning process, with plenty of dead ends along the way. I’ve worked on the project together with Claude AI and, later, GPT-6.1, using them to help investigate the code, debug problems, and rethink approaches that weren’t working. Getting this far has involved digging into the EE, IOP, memory handling, communication between the processors, graphics, and BIOS behaviour.
The focus now is on stability, correctness, and performance. The PowerPC JIT is progressing, including native VU instruction pairs and small blocks, but there is still a lot to do.
Reaching the BIOS menu does not mean that PS2 games are generally playable yet. I want to share real progress without promising performance that hasn’t been demonstrated on actual Wii hardware.
Alpha coming soon!
The first alpha will be an experimental release for people interested in following the project and helping test it. There’s no firm release date yet, but after eight months, I finally have a milestone worth sharing.
Thanks for reading — I’m looking forward to sharing more progress with the GBAtemp community!
