PS2 Games in the Browser: Web Recomp, Explained

A PlayStation 2 game, in a browser tab

For most of the emulator era, playing a PlayStation 2 game meant installing PCSX2 and configuring it. In October 2026 a second path appeared: PS2 Web Recomp, a project that turns PS2 games into web pages. Gran Turismo 4 was the first title brought up this way, and God of War II followed through the same scripts.

The method is static recompilation. The game's Emotion Engine machine code is translated ahead of time into C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and drawn with WebGPU compute shaders that reproduce the Graphics Synthesizer. The main CPU is never interpreted: nothing is emulated at runtime in the usual sense.

From 3 frames per second to full speed

The project's README documents the journey in unusually honest detail. The first race ran at 3 fps with a software rasterizer and an interpreter for vector unit 1. Moving the Graphics Synthesizer to WebGPU compute shaders and compiling the vector-unit programs ahead of time raised a race to about 70 fps.

Gran Turismo 4 uploads the same 3 MB of textures every frame of a race. Because the GS swaps its memory between frames, those uploads cannot simply be skipped; a 16 MB cache of recently uploaded contents on the GPU lets most of them be avoided anyway. Even browser scheduling mattered: nested setTimeout calls are clamped to 4 ms, so the emulation loop now yields through a MessageChannel instead.

How to try it

Nothing is downloaded: you bring a disc image of a game you own, and the repository's port script turns it into a web page on your machine. The page needs WebGPU, so Chrome or Edge on Windows and macOS work out of the box; on Linux, WebGPU flags have to be turned on. It uses SharedArrayBuffer for its threads, so it must be served cross-origin isolated, which the included server script does.

There is also a native runner that plays in a window on Linux, built from the same translated code. The status of both titles is tracked on the Gran Turismo 4 and God of War II pages here.

The legal line

The repository contains only original code. The generated C++ and WebAssembly are translations of the game's executable, produced locally from your own disc, and nothing from the game is distributed. That is the same line every project on this site walks: bring your own copy.