Can you play PS2 games on a ps3?

Bone Alone

Yes and no. The best way to tell is to look at the front of the ps3. If you see 4 USB ports then it can. If you only see 2 then it can’t. Of course, some are better than others. The first gen ps3 uses hardware to emulate ps3 games so basically it has a ps2 built into the ps3. The second gen ps3 uses software emulation so it’s not as good as hardware emulation.

SRΛSC

The earlier models, yes. Later ones, no.

Memelord Prime

The very first PS3 models had some capability of doing PS2 emulation. As mentioned the easiest way at a glance to tell is if it's got 4 USB ports on the front , because when they revised the hardware they took out PS2 emulation in addition to removing two USB ports. Models with numbers starting with CECHAxx through CECHExx are backwards compatible. Anything afterwards is not. The CECHC (PAL region exclusive) and CECHE models had software emulation which had more issues with some games than the hardware emulation-based ones, but even those are not 100% compatible with every PS2 game. Any PS3 can download and play PS2 Classics from the PSN store however, and those should work fine for the most part as Sony does their best to configure whatever emulation they use to each game.