PlayStation 2 in your browser
Retrario runs PlayStation 2 games in a tab of Chrome or Edge on your own computer. There is no console to plug in and nothing to install: open the page, press Play.
What runs
The emulator is a fork of Play!, an open-source PlayStation 2 emulator, compiled to WebAssembly. It runs on your computer's processor cores, inside the browser: the console's main processor, its graphics and its sound each get their own thread, and the picture is drawn with WebGL 2. Nothing is streamed as video from a server, so your button presses go straight to the game on your machine.
The games in the catalogue run in full: the menus, whole matches and the sound.
Chrome and Edge
The emulator's threads share one block of memory. A page can only do that with cross-origin isolation and SharedArrayBuffer, and Retrario is built and tested for Chrome and Edge on a computer. Firefox, Safari, other browsers and the browsers inside apps get a notice instead (“Your browser is not supported yet”) with the two browsers to open. Phones and tablets are told they are too slow for the game. The requirements page has the details.
The first start
On the first Play, the game's files are copied once into the browser's private storage for this site, and the copy is checked before it is used. Plan for about 2 GB of space. An interrupted copy carries on where it stopped. Later starts read the game from this copy, so they are quick. Each browser keeps its own copy; Settings › Storage shows it and can remove it.
The second session is faster
While you play, the emulator translates the console's code into WebAssembly. That compiled code is kept in the browser too, so the next session starts with most of it ready and stutters less after loading a match. When the emulator gets a new version, it carries the old code over and rebuilds it in the background.
The games
Today the catalogue holds one game, a football game from the PlayStation 2 years: see its page. The hub also shows the consoles that come later (PlayStation 1, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance), with no games yet.
Players choose what comes next. In the app, Request a game lists the requests with their votes: a signed-in member can add up to 3 requests a day and vote for the others, and the most voted game is the next one the project works on.
Controllers
Play with the keyboard or a gamepad (Xbox and PlayStation pads work through the browser), alone, with two people on one computer, or online with a friend. See Controls for the keys and Play online for matches between two computers.
Play now Chrome or Edge on a computer, nothing to install.