Buying a Japanese PS2 would probably be the easiest for just popping in discs and going, I'm sure there's tons of used ones you can grab off almost any site.
PCSX2 doesn't have particularly high requirements, if you can run Dolphin you can run it. If you aren't boosting the resolution, or just scaling it, you'd have to have some pretty outdated hardware for it to not work with most games. It does not have the world's greatest compability for being such a long standing and popular emulator, it's only at like 96%. The project has varied all over the place from trying compability to trying to be cycle accurate and back again so it can be quirky.
Don't even grab the stable installer, it's like four years out of date or something, just grab the latest build.
PS2 games can be super weird because the hardware is super weird, you might be running Twisted Metal Black at 4K and 60fps perfectly with all the fancy features jacked up, then pop in Dead or Alive 2 and watch it crawl at original resolution, then move onto God of War and be back to maxing out everything. (This is not a statement on their current state of emulation, just a somewhat hypothetical example.)
If you're doing any playing of PC games over the last few years, if you target say 640x480 as the internal framebuffer (higher than any PS2 game actually runs at iirc) and then scale up to 1080p, I'm sure most games will be fine enough. If you have pretty good hardware that chews up most recent PC games doubling or tripling the original internal resolution is quite easy to get away with.
On a TV it won't save you huge amounts since scaling isn't majorly stressful on GPUs but letting the TV handle any upscaling might be the difference between keeping the framerate stable and occasional drops or frame mistimings.