Nick Fernandez / Android Authority
TL;DR
- NetherSX2-Turnip is a fork of the PS2 emulator NetherSX2 with custom drivers tweaked for Snapdragon chips.
- One such driver in particular is optimized for the Snapdragon 865 that powers a number of handheld consoles.
- Gamers can install NetherSX2-Turnip alongside the standard edition to choose which works best for each game.
Retro gaming on a handheld console is tons of fun — don’t get us wrong — but dialing-in the perfect experience there can involve a lot more effort than we always like. One big problem these devices often face is the balance between wanting to go with component choices that make the finished product nice and affordable, and being able to deliver the kind of performance needed to handle increasingly demanding games. But now one new emulator fork has arrived to help out with some of our headaches in just that department.
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We’re talking about NetherSX2-Turnip, a modified version of the popular NetherSX2 emulator for the Sony PS2. While NetherSX2 is great, the main release has so far lacked a way to easily employ Turnip drivers — custom third-party drivers that have been optimized for the Adreno GPUs in Snapdragon chips.
NetherSX2-Turnip includes three of these drivers baked in: one targeting Snapdragon 865 hardware, one for Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chips (including Elite), and one for all other Snapdragons. Maybe the most important one there is the SD865 option, as it powers popular handhelds like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 despite the chip’s age.
If you felt like your Flip 2 or Pocket 5 just wasn’t quite up to the task of handling all the PS2 games you threw at it, this is absolutely a release you’re going to want to check out. The Turnip drivers may not result in superior performance with every game you try, but one very nice thing about NetherSX2-Turnip is that you can install it right alongside standard NetherSX2, and choose whichever works best for the particular game you want to play at the moment.
When you first fire up NetherSX2-Turnip, if you find that it’s not quite delivering on these performance promises, there are a few settings you might want to check in the hopes of eking out some extra frames — or just correcting graphical glitches. Those include Hardware Download Mode and Blending Accuracy; check the tips in the GitHub project for advice on how to adjust those.
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