RetroAchievements reach a real PlayStation 2, with a PC or phone keeping score

xeRAbora pairs a patched Open PS2 Loader with a client on your PC or Android phone, so achievements unlock while you play on original hardware. It is an alpha, and network-loaded games are not supp...

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

RetroAchievements have always needed an emulator, because something has to watch the game's memory and decide when a goal has been met. A hobby project called xeRAbora moves that job off the emulator. You play on an original PlayStation 2, a second device on your home network keeps score, and the unlocks land on your RetroAchievements profile as usual. Its developer, hacan359, sums it up in the project's README as “RetroAchievements on a real PlayStation 2.”

Retro Dodo wrote it up on 30 September and Time Extension followed on 5 October. The project has moved quickly in between: the releases page shows five alpha builds between 22 September and 2 October.

How it works

There are two parts. The console runs a patched copy of Open PS2 Loader, the homebrew game launcher, shipped as a file called OPL-RA.ELF. A computer on the same network runs the xeRAbora client, which is a single file for Windows, Linux or macOS.

Before you start a game for the first time you pick “RA: check game support” from its menu in the loader. The console identifies the game, the client looks it up on RetroAchievements and sends back the list of memory addresses that game's achievements depend on. While you play, the console reads those addresses every frame and sends them to the client, which works out when an achievement has been earned. It records the unlock on your profile and tells the console, and the TV flashes gold.

The developer says that first check is the step people skip. A game you never checked starts as ordinary Open PS2 Loader and nothing is tracked.

A build released on 30 September added an Android app, credited to a second contributor, MrRexD, that runs the whole client on a phone running Android 8.0 or later. The console finds the phone on the Wi-Fi and each unlock arrives as a notification, so a PC is no longer required.

What you need

• A PS2 that can already run Open PS2 Loader, through Free McBoot or similar.
• A network connection on the console: the official Network Adapter on the older, larger models, or the built-in port on a slim.
• Your games as ISO images on a USB stick, an internal hard drive or an SD card adapter in the memory card slot, or the original disc in the drive.
• A PC or Android phone on the same local network, and a RetroAchievements account.

The limits

The README carries a plain warning: “A hobby project in alpha. Use it at your own risk.” The usage guide adds that the tested setups are a USB stick and the original disc, and that most other arrangements are untried or have had one tester.

The clearest gap is network loading. A game that has an achievement set will not run from a network share yet. It boots, then stops loading about a minute in, because the game stream and the achievement data are competing for the console's one network controller. Compressed ZSO images are not covered either.

Playing from a real disc works, but in that mode the loader's virtual memory cards, per-game compatibility patches and cheats are unavailable. Leaderboards are shown with live trackers but run in softcore, so no entries are posted. The release notes also show the kind of bug an alpha turns up: until 29 September some games, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas among them, hung about ten seconds after starting.

Not only for the PS2

Without a console attached, the same client follows your RetroAchievements account while you play on any emulator, showing the current game, new unlocks and what you can still miss.

The more interesting part for other hardware is how little of it is specific to Sony's machine. “The client knows nothing about the PS2,” the README says. The exchange between console and client is a handful of network messages, documented in the repository, and the developer writes that support for another console would need a program on that console that can read its memory, compute the RetroAchievements hash for a game and speak the same protocol.

Sources

• hacan359/xerabora: RetroAchievements on a real PlayStation 2 (GitHub)
• RetroAchievements Come To Original Hardware Thanks To This PS2 Software Plug-In (Time Extension)
• RetroAchievements Have Landed On Your Actual PS2 Console (Retro Dodo)

Image: hacan359 / xeRAbora