Today we are announcing the release of Pcsx2 Playground 1.0.0395
Born as a 'playground' test-bed for Pcsx2 modifications and code, the Playground project evolved into much more, over a period of about 4 months.

First and foremost, we want to express our gratitude to a number of people and groups.
- Thanks to the original Pcsx2 development team, to the betatesters and to everyone that helped them. Without their work, Pcsx2 would not exist, and neither would the Playground project!
- Thanks to the pcsx2 team once more for graciously hosting our forums. You can find them here
http://forums.pcsx2.net/index.php
- Thanks tothe Pcsx2 team once again for providing hosting space
- Thanks to Gigaherz for the render used in the playground logo
- Thanks to all the people who tried the various Playground revisions over these months, providing us with helpful feedback
- Thanks to everyone else who supported Playground, without you all this would have not been possible!

Now, on to the question which you all want to see answered. What is the deal with Pcsx2 Playground? What can I expect?
Pcsx2 Playground is now a branch of pcsx2, coded by volunteers and with improvements over the original, without (hopefully) too many bugs added

Here is an incomplete list of the improvements:
- Improved Frameskip/VU-skip
- Extra VU/FPU Flags are supported
- Different VU/FPU clamping
- More Speedhacks
- Special Game Fixes Section
- Advanced Options Section
- Various Optimizations/Fixes
- Improved MTGS mode
- Emotion Engine recompiler fixes
- Hopefully a stabler experience in general during emulation
- A brand new logo and icon!

Please understand that while this is a milestone, the playground project is always in development, and so different versions can break or fix games. Especially if you compile on your own from the svn repository.
Also, we don't have all the playstation 2 games out there, nor do we have the time to test them all at each revision, so we may have broken games which were working in the official pcsx2 builds.
And do keep in mind that while the changes applied will hopefully result in better emulation, Playground does alot more work with default-settings in order to increase compatibility in problematic games, and this means that with default-options, some games might be slower. However, you can change these settings in the speedhacks dialog for increased speed; Please refer to the guide/faq in our forums for more information about this.

If you want to help us, be it by coding, testing, reporting bugs and in any other way, please refer to this thread in our forums
http://forums.pcsx2.net/thread-2319.html

And finally, the download link. This is a fully functional pcsx2 playground pack, EXCEPT for the bios. You need to dump the bios from your own ps2, refer to the guide on pcsx2.net on how to do so. This pack contains stable versions for the most stable and/or used plugins. Just extract it somewhere (like, c:\ ).
http://www.pcsx2.net/files/12025

And this here is mainly for the Linux people but it works on Windows as well.
This source code snapshot has svn revision 396 (a few fixes for Linux over rev 395), which you can build on your OS's.
Note: These are the sources, not the release!