I've been playing Outbreak, the semi-forgotten online PS2 co-op Resident Evil spinoff with friends recently and I've had a great time, but it'd be fun to play the games with others as well, especially now that I have some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.
They're free, have low requirements (pretty much any semi-decent computer made in the last decade should run PCSX2 just fine) and you won't need to worry about exposing your Steam/Xbox/PSN/Nintendo username as you'd just be using a free Outbreak fan server account + an ingame alias and the game allows you to set up 3 different aliases per account.
There'd be no need for voice chat either if you want to have the classic PS2 Outbreak experience and rely on the ingame ad-lib system
You'd need
- PCSX2 (Windows, Linux, Mac), XBSX2, (On Xboxes with dev mode unlocked) a PS2 or a fat PS3
- Patched Japanese roms of Outbreak File 1 and 2 (easy to find)
- Memory card files with the required online settings files ( also easy to find)
- An obsrv account
Here is a tutorial video that goes over the setup process (for Windows). The memory cards mentioned above are linked in the description. Instead of patching the Japanese roms into English yourself, you can find them pre-patched on 💿Romance
Is it possible to play with a real PS2 with no mods? Maybe with a custom dns?
It is, actually. The wiki at obsrv.org has instructions on how to set things up on a real PS2 and in fact recommends it as the most stable option. Not sure if there would be load time shenanigans between a PS2's DVD read speed and emulators running on all sorts of different devices.
http://wiki.obsrv.org/index.php?n=Main.HomePage
It looks like you can also play on a PS3! Neat.
Note that you will need a way to run the patched Japanese isos at the very least, unless you have the original Japanese discs on hand and the region locking isn't an issue.
Remember that you don't need to hard mod your PS2 in this day and age with things like FreeMCBoot.
It would be awesome to play online on an original PS2, but it's looking like emulation would be more performant, and prettier too.
I wonder why only the JP version though, it's a shame though bc I got the original game
Yeah, you can play the game upscaled to any resolution you want and in widescreen, and it looks very nice (apart from the widescreen patch occasionally displaying stuff that was not intended to be seen):
The reason for the fan server only working with the Japanese versions of the games is because the JPN region servers were what the team behind the fan server managed to reverse engineer. The US and European server were killed in 2007 while Capcom kept the Japanese servers going on for 4 more years. There's actually a video about the creation of the fan server on Youtube.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: