OK, so been trying this for the first time tonight. I fired up Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy XII - both of which I ripped to ISOs on my internal platter HDD (as opposed to my internal SSD).
Both of them look great, I actually think DQVIII might be the more impressive of the two just because of the art style. Wow!!! I'm running everything with the internal resolution set at my monitor's 1920x1200 native resolution, and fullscreening them widescreen. Nice that PCSX2 realizes the aspect ratio difference and adds the black bars. I also tried Jak2 since the compatibility list says it worked, but I got a ton of graphical glitches with it.
I am having some issues with FFXII's sound though, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice (or knows if these are just known issues). For some reason, rather frequently FFXII will just freeze for a split second, almost like it's loading something from the ISO, not sure what it's doing, but I haven't been able to get it to stop, has anyone seen this?
Also, the sound on FFXII sounds a bit . . . tinny? Almost like there isn't enough reverb or bass. DQ8 is fine, but obviously its score is pre-recorded orchestral stuff so it's not the console-generated music. Also, in both games the sound will sometimes go wacko when the game loads something like a menu, or like, in FFXII, when in the intro they enter that first gate in the tutorial before the Tonberry flying machine. It will get all garbled.
I'm using the SPU2-X plug-in, but maybe I need to look for newer versions of these plug-ins than are included with the PCSX2 download? Anyone know where to find those?