Play!

Play! is a PlayStation 2 emulator by Jean-Philip Desjardins, whose copyright notice on it starts in 2006, for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. Its website states the aim: “making PlayStation2 emulation easy and accessible. Just pop in your favorite game’s disc and have fun!” It promises “Easy configuration. No custom settings to fix specific games.” The Android version is the same emulator with a touch interface.

How it works without a BIOS

Most PS2 emulators need a copy of the console’s BIOS, which only comes from a real PlayStation 2. Play! is a high-level emulator: instead of running Sony’s system software, it re-implements what games ask of it. That is why the site can say “No BIOS required”, and why it needs no BIOS or firmware from Sony; the APK contains no BIOS or firmware, only the emulator and a small file of per-game settings.

What it does

• Game library: you pick folders, and it lists the disc images it finds, with titles and covers.
• Disc images in .iso, .mds, .isz, .cso, .cue and .chd formats, and homebrew .elf programs.
• Graphics: OpenGL, or Vulkan, which the settings mark as experimental; resolution up to 8× the original, a widescreen option and bilinear filtering.
• On-screen controls, which can be switched off when you play with a gamepad, and a frame-rate counter.
• Translations, Brazilian Portuguese among them.

What goes online

From the 0.72 code: after it scans the folders you’ve added, it sends the disc IDs (serial numbers) of your games to TheGamesDB (api.thegamesdb.net) to get their titles, descriptions and box art, and downloads the covers from cdn.thegamesdb.net. We found no setting to turn this off; a “Reset Cache” option only clears the stored covers. Apart from that, there are no update checks, analytics or crash reports, and our scan found no trackers.

The permissions it asks for

Six: reading and writing storage, for games on older Android versions; internet, and the network and Wi-Fi state, which it checks before downloading covers; plus one that the AndroidX library adds for internal use.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 0.72, from the stable downloads folder that purei.org’s download page links to. The site publishes no checksum or certificate fingerprint for it. We recorded its signer, a certificate issued to Jean-Philip Desjardins in Montreal, on our first download and require the same one for every update.
• The keystore with that key has been in the public source repository since 2017. We found no real password for it in the repository or its history: the build workflow reads it from the project’s private settings, and the password in the README is only an example that doesn’t open this keystore.
• Google Play has the same package name, at version 0.70; we can’t check the key Play uses, so we can’t say whether the Play version updates over this file.
• The 13.8 MB file runs on Android 4.4 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. PS2 emulation is demanding, so a recent phone helps.
• Play! is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause licence. The screenshots on purei.org show commercial games, and we don’t show other people’s game footage, so this page has none.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).