I love discovering achievements when I'm playing games on the PS5. I was recently playing Split Fiction with my girlfriend, and we were picking up such strange achievements for the most random things, adding in another element of searching to an already great game. RetroAchievements bring that same feel to our favourite retro games, giving us some extra accountability when playing and providing a whole new experience when playing through our favourite titles.
The main issue is that RetroAchievements usually work in tandem with emulators, meaning you have to play on your PC/Mac or a handheld emulator to make them work. You could never access them by switching on your actual PS2, until now, that is.
There's now a program called xeRAbora, created by hacan359, which allows you to access RetroAchievements on your actual PS2, alongside Open PS2 Loader with a PC client. Essentially, your PS2 plays the game, and your PC watches the game memory as you play. RetroAchievements then follows along and tracks everything that you unlock, making your TV flash gold whenever you've unlocked something.
RetroAchievements without an emulator, working with your original discs on actual hardware - it's the thing dreams are made of, right? xeRAbora supports Windows, macOS, and Linux and works with OPL on any network-connected PS2. It also has emulator support when you don't have a PS2.
xeRAbora is still in the Alpha testing stage at the moment, but hopefully it won't take long to be finalised and rolled out with all bugs squashed so we can all experience it while playing our favourite PS2 games.
Here are the steps you'll need to follow to download xeRAbora as shown on PSX-Place:
- Download OPL-RA.ELF and xerabora.exe (Windows) or xerabora-linux-x86_64 (Linux) from the releases.
- Put OPL-RA.ELF in the same place you've filed OPL and launch it instead of OPL. It essentially acts as OPL 1.2.0 with two extra items in each game's menu.
- Go to OPL open Settings → Notifications, and make sure they are On. Then Save Changes, and cold-boot your console. It ships off by default, and the RA menu items show their result as an on-screen notice, so leave it off, and you see nothing.
- Run xerabora on the PC. It asks for your RetroAchievements username and password once, then saves a login token in your user profile (%LOCALAPPDATA%\xerabora on Windows, ~/.config/xerabora on Linux). The password is not stored.
- On the console, select a game, open its menu (triangle), and choose RA: test PC connection. A notice tells you whether xeRAbora answered, from which address, and how fast. If nothing answers, check that the PC is on the same network and that the firewall allows inbound UDP 18194.
- In the same menu, choose RA: check game support. The console hashes the disc image and asks the PC whether RetroAchievements knows it; the notice shows the game title and the achievement counts (total, unlocked, unsupported). Supported games get an RA prefix in the list and a badge on the cover art.
- Start the game. Within about 30 seconds, the PC shows the first snapshot and the number of achievements it is tracking. Unlocks appear in the PC window and on your profile.
You can download xeRAbora from hacan359's GitHub page!
