According to Wikipedia, there are a total of 3,874 games released for the PlayStation 2. That’s a huge amount of content, and content you currently can’t play without owning the original machine or an early PS3 (before Sony removed backwards compatibility). So it’s good to hear that Sony is finally bringing PS2 game emulation to the PS4, and with it a number of enhancements to the visuals.

Sony decided not to make a big deal about PS2 emulation, instead they quietly released four titles that utilize the emulator as part of the PS4 Star Wars bundle. The PS2 games included are Super Star Wars, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.

Digital Foundry released a video showing off the games running on PS4 using the emulator. Notice how good they look:

Sony has confirmed since these games were made available that PS2 emulation is currently being worked on, but they won’t say what we can expect. Will we be able to put PS2 discs in a PS4 and have them run in an enhanced state? Or will Sony expect us to buy PS2, and by default PSOne games through PSN in order to play them.

I suspect PS2 discs will be made to work. The reason? Microsoft’s Backwards Compatibility feature on Xbox One. To not allow original PS2 discs to run on PS4 would be pounced upon by Microsoft’s PR team. They would note that Xbox One is capable of playing Xbox 360 games using original discs, but Sony can’t even get that to work for PS2 games. You can see how that would be a bit of a PR disaster for Sony.

For now you can enjoy those four Star Wars games running at a native resolution of 1292×896 upscaled to 1080p and a bit of texture filtering. Let’s hope hundreds, if not thousands of other PS2 games get unlocked to use the same emulator soon.