If you have original PS2 discs, can you play PS2 games on your PS4?

I looked for that in the article, but it seems the issue was deliberately avoided. I doubt it will be allowed. My memory on this is fuzzy, and I can't cite authoritative sources for obvious reasons, but I'm pretty sure there are multiple companies that know how to press PS2 discs with the obligatory "copy protection" [1] signatures. I assume the market wasn't flooded with these ~10 years ago because anyone with a DVD burner could be selling the latest games on the street for chipped consoles before a pressing operation was even finished cutting a glass master.

[1]: Scare quotes because these mechanisms don't directly have anything to do with copying. They're designed to distinguish between licensed and unlicensed discs, regardless of the content. Copying the content of a PS2 disc is trivial, as these things go.

Thanks for the reply and analysis.

I still have my 1st run PS3 which has the PS2 hardware built in and has ~100% backward compatibility with PS2 games.

However, I ideally prefer to use just my PS4 and not have a 2nd system to manage.

not to mention they will want to sell you same games twice

Interestingly enough, the XBox One now supports XBox 360 games using original discs. Currently, there are about 100 compatible games.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/backward-compatibility

It… sort of does. It doesn’t actually use the original disk as anything but a piracy dongle; the game you play is downloaded from their servers and run directly from the hard drive.

Indeed, but that means you do not have to repurchase it, which was the point ;).

What PS2 emulator for PC plays even 50% of games well?

I don't know if it'll play 50% of games well but pcsx2 has a compatibility list[1] which lists the playability of a lot of games.

[1] http://pcsx2.net/compatibility-list.html

pcsx2 works pretty well for all games I've tried so far. Which is admittedly a small number.

The Wii U supports all Wii games discs. It's a nice feature.