PCSX2 is a PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux, started by the same team that brought you PCSX (a Sony PlayStation 1 emulator).
The PCSX2 project attempts to allow PS2 code to be executed on your computer, thus meaning you can put a PS2 DVD or CD into your computers drive, and boot it up!
The project has been running for almost thirteen years now (since 2001), and since it’s initial release has grown in compatibility. From initially just being able to run a few public domain demos, it’s current state enables many games to boot and actually be perfectly playable, such as the ‘famous’ Final Fantasy X or Devil May Cry 3.
History
A nice overview of our projects history can be found in this article written by one of the developers: The history of pcsx2
My role
In 2001/2002 I first started out as a betatester for the PCSX2 team. Being a regular in a handful of emulation related IRC channels (Emulation64/NGemu), I was asked to join the PCSX2 to help out with testing builds.
As the original website started to become outdated (it was basically just a HTML page) I was asked to develop a new dynamic website from scratch. The team had seen my work on the Dolphin GameCube emulator website and wanted something similar for their project as well. In collaboration with ckemu we created the ‘blue’ design in 2006 from scratch which was a major change from the original. Besides having a CMS like system to maintain our blog posts, we now also had a system that allowed us to maintain a compatibility list for the games we supported. The frontend would allow users to quickly search and sort through the game database. The blue design is still somewhat accessible at http://classic.pcsx2.net. (It was build using PHP/Smarty Template Engine/MySQL/MyBB)
Because of the continuous increase of visitors (we receive 22K~26K visitors daily on our site and forums), we recently migrated our custom build CMS to Joomla. While I still work on the website every now and then, I mostly handle server admin tasks on our dedicated server for the PCSX2 team.