Good morning friends! Friday and throughout the weekend I attempted to mark another thing off my Steam Deck ToDo list. This morning I am going to do a half-assed job of walking you through how I got a sizeable number of emulators up and running on my device. Essentially I am leaning heavily upon something called EmuDeck, which is less an emulator and more a series of scripts that configure emulators for you, and install what you need to add all of the individual games to steam. If things go successfully you end up with something similar to the above screenshot, with beautiful images representing each game and the ability to launch them directly from steam while in game mode. I am going to attempt to walk you through the logical order of getting things set up.
Installing EmuDeck
The first thing that you need to do is download EmuDeck. This is going to work much better if you launch your web browser of choice while in Desktop Mode on your steam deck. Visit https://www.emudeck.com/ and click on the download menu option, then the download app button. This will drop an executable package in your download folder by default.
Open up the Dolphin file browser and browse to your download directory. Before you can do anything you are going to need to open up properties on the item that just downloaded and click over to the permissions tab and make sure “Is Executable” is checked. Once you have done this double-click the file and this should begin the install process for EmuDeck.
I am not going to walk you through the entire setup process for EmuDeck, there are other guides out there like the above video that do a much better job of this. Essentially there are two choices that matter, the first is if you want to do the Easy setup or the Expert setup. The Easy setup will have very minimal options and largely just configure everything for you. It will however skip a few things that might be useful, like a drive for gyro controls that you can use with the switch/wiiu emulators. The expert mode will require keyboard input however so make sure you are at minimum remoting into your deck through the steam link like that I talked about last week. The other major choice will be if you want to install it to your local storage or an SD card. I chose the latter for reasons I will get into later, there can be significant problems if you fill up your internal storage.
Enabling SFTP for File Transfer
In theory, EmuDeck just installed a slew of folders and emulators on your device, but next, you are going to have to transfer some ROM files before you can make any meaningful progress. I am not going to tell you how to acquire ROM files, other than to say that you should dump your own ROMs for legal reasons. In order to get the files over to your deck, we are going to need some reliable method of transfer. I looked into a large number of options, but given that the Steam deck is just a Linux device, the most straightforward seems to be enabling SSH and then using SFTP. If you are following along my journey you should have set a password for your device. If you have not done that yet, please refer back to my previous article. Type the following command into Konsole:
sudo systemctl enable sshd
This will prompt you to enter the password for your account, and when you do so it will enable the SSH daemon to start on boot. However, in order to get this running the first time, you will need to restart your steam deck and we have one step to check while we are in Game Mode, so don’t go right back into Desktop Mode quite yet.
You should know your password, but we need to verify while in game mode what your console hostname is set to. The default for this is “steamdeck” but in theory, while you were configuring other options you might have changed this not understanding what it is used for. To check what your hostname is go to settings > system and scroll down until you find an argument called hostname. You can see in the above screenshot that mine is still set to the default which is “steamdeck”.
Next, you are going to need an SFTP client, and this is entirely your choice. There are many options, but I just happened to have Filezilla because I have been using it for decades. Ultimately in order to connect to your Steam Deck you need the following information:
Host – you should have just seen that in the previous step
Port – you should be able to leave this blank, but if your client requires this set enter port 22.
User – you should enter “deck” for your username.
Password – the system password that you configured previously in Konsole.
If this works you should be connected to the filesystem of your steam deck remotely. By default, you will be in the /home/deck/ directory, but you should be able to change this to wherever you need to go. If you chose to install EmuDeck to your SD Card and formatted your SD Card in the steam deck… you should be able to reach those files from the following path:
/run/media/mmcblk0p1
If you chose to install EmuDeck to your local storage, then the path for you should be the following:
/home/deck/emudeck/backend
In theory, you are going to be spending all of your time in either /roms or /bios and in the ROMs directory EmuDeck will have stubbed out the correct folder structure for each system. Copy your legally obtained ROM files into these directories and we can proceed with the next steps. If you are using the internal storage of your device, please be careful not to copy too much data during this process. Keep a close eye on the storage limits for your device. If you fill the internal storage and the system does not have enough room to write temporary files, it will appear bricked and go into a bootup loop. I will talk a bit about that later, this is fixable.
Configuring your Games
Boot back into Desktop Mode, and EmuDeck should have dropped a shortcut to something called the Steam Rom Manager onto your desktop. For this step, I had to find a screenshot from the internet because running the Rom Manager will disconnect Steam LInk. You will need to complete this step on the physical hardware or through some sort of port replicator that doesn’t rely on Steam Link. Essentially you want to click the Preview tab in the sidebar, then click the Generate App List button that appears at the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, there will be a countdown of sorts for “Remaining Providers” once this reaches zero you can click the “Save App List” button at the bottom and every game that the Rom Manager has found will be registered with Steam as a new game.
At this point, I suggest you close the Rom Manager and open Steam while in desktop mode on your device. This will re-enable Steam Link and allow you to connect back in remotely again, which is highly suggested for this next step. We are going to return to our old friend Boilr, that I talked about in the previous article. It is my experience that the results of what Steam Rom Manager files for images, is going to be very hit and miss. As a result, I used Boilr to plug any gaps that the Manager failed to find images for. This is going to be very time-consuming because each time you set an image and go back to the listing of games… it will reset your position back to the top of the list causing you to endlessly scroll to find where you left off. However, the end result was very “worth it” for me because it gives me pretty images for each game on my list.
Once you have finished setting all of the game images, click the button at the bottom of the screen with the Controller and Steam icon. This will export all of your game data to Steam so that it shows up correctly when you are in game mode. If you boot back into Game Mode, you will in theory see a bunch of grid images in place of the ugly grey rectangles and get an interface that looks something like the image at the beginning of this post. Now you should be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your effort.
Troubleshooting Issues
Ultimately you are going to get some games and more specifically platforms… to work without any issues. Others are going to require a lot of troubleshooting to get working correctly. Currently, I have the following platforms working under the combination of emulators that this process installs.
Dreamcast
Gameboy Advance
Genesis
Nintendo
Nintendo 64
PlayStation
PSP
Super Nintendo
Turbografx 16
Of the emulators that I have moved data over to the SD Card for, I cannot seem to get 32X and Sega CD working, but have also not spent a ton of time troubleshooting those. Thankfully on the EmuDeck GitHub page, there is a cheat sheet of sorts that lists what types of ROMs and Archives each emulator will support. This is not 100% correct at all times, however, because for Dreamcast it clearly states that it will support 7zip archives, and the Rom Manager identified those games… but I could not get ANY of the Dreamcast games to load until I extracted them to individual directories.
The biggest thing that you will run into with any of the semi-modern consoles is that they require a BIOS image in order to work. This is essentially how emulator developers get around the copyrighted portions of code, but rely on you to acquire a legally dumped boot image. You will have to research what is needed for each system, but once I supplied the correct BIOS for Dreamcast and Playstation those games started working beautifully. I need to put in some research into how DuckStation handles multidisk games, because right now the only PS1 game that I have copied over that is working, is Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
So You Bricked Your Steam Deck
This is not my image, but I absolutely went through this when I copied files to the wrong location. Essentially it is possible to get into a boot loop where you just see a cursor… before rebooting again and it goes on forever. Essentially in my case, this was caused by getting confused and accidentally flooding my internal storage with ROMs… eating up all of the remaining space. As I said earlier if you fill your internal storage too full and the system cannot create certain temporary files on boot… it will get stuck in this loop.
Thankfully Valve foresaw this happening and has provided bootable media that can fix it. The Steam Recovery disk is in theory designed to allow you to reinstall the operating system or nuke your home directory, but it is so much more valuable than that. It is essentially a “live” version of SteamOS that boots from removable storage. Thankfully I had spare SD Cards laying around, and in order to use that method, it requires at least 8GB of storage. You can in theory also do this off a bootable thumb drive connected to the USB C port via an A to C adapter of some sort.
How I got around NOT deleting all of my progress, was that while in the Live OS I just opened up Dolphin and browsed to the directory where I had copied the ROMs… then deleted them. After doing this make sure you also remove them from the Trash as they will still be taking up disk space until you have done this step. In theory, you should be able to reboot and your pricey toy comes back to life. If you did something more severe to bung up your system, you can use the disk to reinstall the base operating system from scratch. As I said I did not want to take this step if I could help it, because it would have undone all of the work I had already finished on getting things running on my device.
What’s Next?
I think the next big thing that is on my radar is getting both PlayStation remote play and Xbox remote play working. Other than that, however, I think my Deck is in a pretty good state. I want to fiddle around a bit more with the emulators that I technically have installed but are not working for whatever reason. The big one for me would be able to get Breath of the Wild working with durability cheats, and maybe work a bit on getting some 3DS games loading successfully.
I think everything else is probably going to wait until I get my 1TB m.2 drive from eBay. I picked up an M.2 to USB adapter and I have high hopes of using it and Clonezilla to effectively clone all of my progress from my 64GB internal drive to the new 1TB internal. I mostly don’t want to do too much effort if I know I might possibly have to start over from scratch again with a fresh operating system install. Thankfully however I already have the recovery disk primed to install the operating system fresh on the new drive if it comes to that.
The post Steam Deck Emulation appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were expecting to be down both a Grace and a Tam but at the very last minute, Tam was available. We talked a bit about the new Return to Monkey Island game and how it is educating us on important anchor facts. From there we talk about one of the longest-to-deliver Kickstarter called Two Guys Spaceventure, which styles itself as a new Space Quest game but largely fails at delivering. From there we talk about the card games of Richard Garfield and what his initial design intent was versus how the games actually play. From there we talk a bit about Star Ocean: The Divine Force which has released a demo this week. We talked a bit about the announcement of the 4000 Series Nvidia cards and the 70% price increase that comes with them. We talked about how Twitch seems to be eating itself and the onslaught of folks shifting to YouTube after changes in revenue splits. Finally, Bel talks about getting a Steam Deck and how he has already caused his device to get into a boot loop. We talk a bit about how the hardware works as an utterly hands-off console for Tam but also allows Bel to tinker endlessly with his setup.
Destiny on the Steam Deck running under Stadia
Yesterday I set a list of things that I wanted to do in pretty short order in order to get things that are not steam up and running on my new deck. Yesterday I managed to accomplish four of them, and this morning I am going to walk you through the process of getting things up and running. This will not necessarily be a straightforward tutorial, because there are a few tools along the way that makes the entire process much easier. However as you can see in the above screenshot I have Cyberpunk 2077 installed from GOG, Ooblets installed from the Epic Game Store, Stadia streaming configured, and Xbox Cloud Gaming configured. This morning I am going to talk you through how to do each of them.
Using Steam Link for Remote Desktop
First things first, I highly suggest you grab the stand-alone Steam Link application. While under normal circumstances, this would allow you to play your steam games on another machine. In this specific case, we are going to use it as a remote desktop application. You can connect to your Steam Deck while in desktop mode, and gain access to the keyboard and mouse from your computer which will greatly speed up data input. The only thing that does not work is cut and paste… and I have been using a Google Doc as swap space that I can have open both on the Steam Deck and my Desktop as a way of passing inputs back and forth. This video covers the mobile steam link setup, but it is going to function much the same way and should help you through the pairing process if you have never completed it.
Once you have set up Steam link, you should be able to flip your device into Desktop Mode through the power menu and then connect to it like a Linux desktop. In theory, you should now see a screen something similar to the above with some icons in the taskbar. The first thing we are going to need to do is to launch the discover app. It should be the third icon from the left that looks like a blue shopping bag. This application is essentially a Linux app store and allows you to very easily download and install applications. We are essentially going to grab two things… Microsoft Edge and a piece of software called Boiler.
Downloading Edge and Boilr
Once in the discover app you can either type “Edge” into the search bar or filter down by application type and Edge will be located under Applications > Internet > Web Browsers. Please note the very first time you load Discover, it will take a very long time for the applications to show up. It seems to be downloading some databases in the background. If you get to a screen that says something to the effect of no applications found, close the app and relaunch it. We are specifically downloading Edge as our web browser because Microsoft did a really cool thing and added native support for the Steam Deck as a controller, which means we won’t have to manually map inputs as though we were using a keyboard.
While we are in Discover, go ahead and download an app called “Boilr”. I found out about this application through this video, but essentially it is a helper application that assists in registering games with the Steam Deck and adding custom artwork. It will automagically import games that were installed through Heroic Games Launcher, which I will talk about a little bit later but also be extremely helpful in making our cloud streaming links look reasonable. It has a database of artwork that you can search through and pick which image you want to use for the games on your deck.
Configuring Xbox Cloud Gaming
Now that we have Microsoft Edge and Boilr installed, we are going to begin the process of setting up Xbox Cloud Gaming first. While still in the desktop mode we are going to need to do a few things to make sure that Microsoft Edge has access to your controller. This is going to require you to input some console commands, which is in part why I suggested configuring Steam Link so you had access to a keyboard. This is all going to use an application that can be found in the System menu called Konsole, which is the KDE Shell application. The very first thing we have to do is set a password for our steam deck account. This process is initiated with the following command:
passwd
When you type that in and hit enter, it will prompt you to submit a new password. You will not be able to see your key input, this is normal. Hit enter and it will prompt you to verify the password you just input, which again will not echo your keypresses to the screen by default. If you successfully typed the same password twice you should now have your password configured. Remember this, you will need to use it any time you issue a command that requires elevated access.
Next up we are going to have to give the Microsoft Edge browser permission to use the controller. Thankfully Microsoft is being awesome in this case and has given us a guide that we can follow to do this entire process. While still in the console application you need to type the following, or open the web article above and paste it into the command line:
If you are in the console session that you just opened and set your password, it should execute without issue. If you are in a new session it will prompt you to enter your password. When you do so it should execute and then we are ready to start setting up the shortcuts.
Now we are going to launch Steam while still in Desktop Mode, and add a “Non-Steam Game to My Library”. In the dialogs that follow, choose Microsoft Edge, and this instance of Edge is where we are going to configure Xbox Cloud Gaming. Once you’ve successfully added Edge to your library, find it on the lefthand side menu of your games, and choose properties.
The first thing we want to do is change the name from Microsoft Edge to something like “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. This naming is largely so that we will have an easier time finding images for it later in boilr. The final step before being able to test this is to configure the launch options. By default the launch parameters for Microsoft Edge looks like this:
run –branch=stable –arch=x86_64 –command=/app/bin/edge –file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
We need to append this string:
 –window-size=1024,640 –force-device-scale-factor=1.25 –device-scale-factor=1.25 –kiosk “https://www.xbox.com/play“
So that the final combined string looks like this:
This will launch the browser directly into XCloud and allow you to begin streaming. Now while still in Steam Desktop Mode, we want to test this out. Essentially everything that you do in Desktop mode, you are going to need to launch it at least once to make sure it is working as expected. Close out of any existing copies of Edge and give the new shortcut you just created a spin.
If done correctly you will get the Xbox Cloud Gaming website launched full screen. It is likely going to require you to log into it the first time but should remember your information each time you launch it from that point forward. Before we go back to game mode, there is one last thing we want to do in order to make the experience slightly better.
Now you want to launch Boiler, and if you click on the images tab you should see a section stubbed out for “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. If you click into that section it should allow you to configure an image for each of the display areas within Steam aka the Hero, Grid, Big Picture, etc images. When you are finished setting everything up there is an icon that the bottom that shows a Controller with an arrow pointing at the Steam logo. This will import your changes into the steam database on the local machine, and when you flip back to game mode, it will now show all of those images correctly.
While it was a lot of steps… you have not configured XCloud streaming on your steam deck.
Configuring Stadia
The steps for configuring Stadia for the most part follow the same sequence as configuring XCloud, but having done several of them you can simply start at the adding a Non-Steam game to your library step. Once again you want to find Microsoft Edge in your list and add it to your library, and then view properties on that game. In the shortcut, we want to rename this one from Edge to Stadia, and again we are going to have to change some of the launch options. The default launch should look like this:
run –branch=stable –arch=x86_64 –command=/app/bin/edge –file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
Once again we are appending a chunk of text to the end of those launch parameters that will configure the window size, kiosk mode, and launch the stadia website:
Once again you want to close out any Edge windows that you have open and launch your shortcut. In theory, if everything worked as expected you should see a full-screen session of the Stadia website. You will need to log in with your google account, but once done you should have full access to stadia. Your final step would be to launch boilr again and configure the images so that it has something other than an ugly grey square when in game mode.
Configuring Epic Game Store and GOG
This process is going to be considerably easier than everything you have just gone through. It will still require you to be in Desktop Mode, however. Launch Discover again and this time type in “Heroic” which should bring up the Heroic Games Launcher. This application is an open-source installer that currently covers both Epic Games Store and GOG. It does a few other things that I will talk about later, but the first step is installing it. Click install and once finished launch the application while in Desktop Mode.
When you first open the application it will prompt you to log into your Epic Games account and your GOG account. Doing each will allow the application to access the games you have access to on your account. Once you have completed each, those games should now show up in your library as something you have the ability to download and install.
For GOG I chose to install Cyberpunk 2077, since that is ultimately where I own my copy of that game. It took forever to install and just so you are aware it goes through a process. The first bit is to download the game, then it goes through a configuring files step, then finally it installs the game and does some cleanup before the game is ready to play. Given that I was installing an over 60GB game to an SD card… this all took a very long time. Unfortunately, the Heroic Game Launcher only allows you to download a single game at a time, and things cannot be queued up.
Once finished I launched the game the first time in the Desktop Mode to make sure it was working as expected. Then I hopped into Boilr to make sure the images were correctly set. Then from that point forward I could launch the game happily in game mode. Effectively everything you do in Desktop Mode at least once in order to make sure it will run when you flip back into Game Mode. Essentially Game Mode masks a lot of processes so if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to see why.
I used Ooblets as my test case for Epic Game Store and again the same process followed. I started the download, and thankfully this one went much faster considering it is only around 800MB for the entire game. I let it finish, then launched it to test that everything worked as expected. Finally, I hopped over into Boilr to configure the images. Since then I have launched both Cyberpunk 2077 and Ooblets a few times while in game mode and everything worked flawlessly.
So in theory, if you have been following along to this point you should now have easy access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, Epic Games Store, and Cyberpunk 2077 on your Steam Deck. Next up I think I am going to start playing around with emulation. There is something called EmuDeck that acts as a launcher for a whole slew of emulators and handles their configuration.
One last bonus benefit of the Heroic Games Launcher is it also serves as a really straightforward way to download and install a large number of Proton compatibility versions. As you follow specific guides they might recommend that you use a specific version of the proton drivers in order to get the best performance. Inside the HGS, there is a whole section labeled the “Wine Manager” that allows you to quickly install every Wine-GE, Wine-Lutris, and Proton-GE driver that you could want. So far the Steam Deck feels like the handheld I have always wanted, that I can basically configure to do anything that I could ever want to do with it.
The post Cloud Streaming on Steam Deck appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I have joined the tribe that is an owner of the Steam Deck. In all honesty, it did not take nearly as long to get my Deck as I thought it might have. For those who might be going down this path and trying to judge the time the process takes to complete… I placed my reservation for the Steam Deck on May 27th or 2022. This was considerably after the original reservation start date of July 16th of 2021, and long after they had already begun shipping out decks. I knew I would have to wait quite a while but was largely okay with that. I completed the confirmation and payment for the Deck on September 12th and then received it on September 20th, with it actually shipping on the 17th some 5 days after the confirmation. We’ve heard anecdotal tales of Valve trying to speed up this process considerably and if you place an order today it lists a window of September to December as the time frame.
The Steam Deck comes in three configurations, and part of the reason why it took me so long to order mine was trying to decide which model I should go for. Thankfully I had a wealth of resources talking about the process of using and upgrading the Deck to help me narrow my choices. So when it comes to gaming I love having a bunch of games installed at any given time. Currently, on my desktop, I have 3 TB of fast NVMe storage and 4 TB of slow mechanical storage. So I knew from the start that 512 for the largest model was simply not going to cut it at all. The core difference between the models comes down to two things… firstly the type and size of storage included and secondly for the final model the finish of the screen. Given that I knew at some point I would be likely dropping at 2 TB m.2 drive in my unit and an anti-glare screen protector, I opted to go for the smallest available amount of storage space.
Basically, it did not make sense to me to pay a markup for storage, that was not going to be useful in the long run… and was really too small for me to repurpose in another environment later. With storage essentially every month, you delay your purchases… the amount of storage that you can buy for your dollar increases. Again thanks to the wealth of information floating around about the Steam Deck I also know that loading games from an SD Card are honestly not that different from loading via internal storage. The above video is an example of this, and having seen it in person… the difference really is that negligible. Loading a game from an SD card takes a bit the very first time, but after that, the games load extremely quickly.
I happened to have a 512GB SD card that I could repurpose for this adventure, which is a bit slower than the image that I am showing above and it works fine. However, if you are inspired by this blog post what you are ultimately looking for in order to get the best performance is an SD Card with the following properties.
A2 – This denotes the Application Performance class and indicates the expected number of Random Read and Writes to the disk. A2 indicates that a disk can sustain 4000 IOPS for random reads and 2000 IOPS for random writes, as opposed to 1500/500 for A1 classification.
U3 – This indicates that the disk supports a maximum transfer speed of 30 MB/s.
If you find an SD Card with those classifications and is from a reputable vendor… you are effectively going to have the best possible results. The card I am actually using is an A1/U1 model which supports the 1500/500 IOPS and 10 MB/s throughputs and I am not experiencing any issues with games. Another cool thing about the SD Cards and the Steam Deck is that you can apparently hot-swap them. So if you have a number of smaller cards you could in theory have specific games on each, and swap them in the middle of your play session or while traveling.
I think the most impressive thing initially is just how sturdy the unit feels. There is no way that Valve is not taking a very large loss on the $399 unit because it feels so exceptionally well crafted. On the hand, it feels very much like a better Nintendo Switch. The grips form to your hands and the little sloped areas on the front of the unique conform perfectly to the curve of your palms. Admittedly I have notoriously large hands, but I was expecting the unit to feel far heavier. It really does not feel significantly different than the weight of the original switch and joycons together. The only real complaint I have is right now my shoulder buttons, and back buttons feel extremely stiff to press. I assume over time this will be less of a case but they are at least for the moment a bit awkward. The face buttons and d-pad, however feel excellent and have a very satisfying actuation. The thumbstick is also excellent and feels like this happy medium between something like the Series X controller and a low-index stick like that of the Switch.
Another impressive thing is the sheer number of configuration options this device has. One of the first things I did was spend some of the points that I have been accruing for years while purchasing games on Steam buying this sweet rainbow keyboard. If you think about the device itself it has two analog sticks, eight face buttons, four shoulder buttons, four back buttons, and two trackpads… all of which are entirely configurable for every single game that you choose to play. On top of that there is easy support for downloading community profiles that someone else has gone through the effort of setting up for a specific game. Little things like mouse emulation using the right trackpad and back triggers to represent left and right mouse buttons… sounds awkward at first but I adapted to it exceptionally quickly.
If you want to get really custom, there is functionality in the UI to add in pop-up menus when you press a trackpad, and the above video covers adding a menu to Guild Wars 2. You can also configure different actions to different usages of the same button so that a tap, a double tap, and a press and hold… all perform different actions. However, this also outlines the key problem that is going to exist for a lot of users. The Steam Deck is not exactly “plug and play”. Even the basic things like installing Cult of the Lamb, required me to fiddle with it a bit to at a minimum set the resolution to the correct 1280×800 16:10 aspect ratio. Most games have required at least something to fiddle with in order to get the best from them.
The deepest dive so far however have been when I was trying to get New World working. Admittedly I am not quite there on the control scheme, but it is functional. Essentially with my desire to start over from scratch and level a new character when the next major patch drops, I figured I might go ahead and get things running on the Steam Deck. In order to do this, I had to track down a piece of software called Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime to fix an error when the game boots up and tries to dial home to EasyAntiCheat Servers and fails. This did not involve going into the desktop mode or running any shell commands, but I still had to know to do it, which required a certain measure of research. Other things that I want to get running are going to require me to do a lot more esoteric things with the device but again… wanting to play a game is often going to require you to resort to google.
So far the actual gameplay however has been phenomenal, and the screen looks gorgeous. I’ve yet to put in a ton of hours on the device because right now it feels like buying a new computer. I am still very much in the “moving in phase” and getting everything set up the way that I want it. I am also doing copious amounts of research because it seems like this device really is the swiss army knife of handheld gaming. Effectively for $400 it appears to be a one size fits all platform and I am going to venture forth into uncharted waters soon. I’ve been collecting a number of things that I am going to start trying and likely reporting back on the success. Here are the things I am planning on attempting to get working.
XCloud Streaming
Xbox and PS5 Remote Play
Epic Game Store and GOG via Heroic Games Launcher
PlayStation Now/PS+
A Plethora of Emulators including Switch/WiiU
Stadia
Android games
Battle.net
Most of these things are going to require some nonsense but given my penchant for such things I am going to soldier on.
I honestly do not feel like I have done a lot with my device yet, but already I am extremely happy with it. I had been holding off on other handheld purchases because at least on paper the Steam Deck seemed like it would be able to do anything I wanted it to do. What is making this all possible however is the legion of fans that are pouring information out into the world. More than a million steam decks have shipped and given that a huge chunk of that player base is folks who are willing to fiddle with things… it ends up equating to massive community support. I even have some nonsense ideas about maybe trying to get one of the laptop devices designed for Samsung Dex, and potentially replace my existing laptop with it.
As always as I do dumb things, I will be giving you information about what has worked and what did not work terribly well.
The post Adventures in Steam Deck appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
