I’ve installed Emudeck on my device, the process was really easy to follow, here’s a guide.
I just made this post to share info and suggestions on the best games to try. Right now I’m playing a (totally owned) rom of Zelda breath of the wild and so far is flawless (although stuck to 30 fps x some reason). Any suggestion for other good game??
Emudeck is heavily discouraged and unsupportorted by a good number of emulator dev teams for refusing to cooperate with them. Emudeck builds configuration files for you, not shying away from not recommended settings and causing issues in some emulators and games.
Also, some emulators have their source code edited and the changes are not documented/not public.
Unfortunately I don’t have an external link about it, can only pin point a quite lenghty conversation and support request I had with a couple of the PCSX2 developers that happened in their Discord server. You can jump to the start of the conversation (if you are in the PCSX2 Discord server) using this link.
The conversation started after I asked them for support for the render window not taking the whole screen when attached to a 4:3 monitor, and told me about why they don’t support at all PCSX2 installs made my Emudeck. Duckstation appears to also not support Emudeck for the lack of cooperation from the project.
Interesting. I had actually been using emudeck because they provide a non-retroarch version of Duckstation (since Retroarch is run by a transphobic shithead)
At the end of the day, the platforms I most emulate on my steam deck are PS1 and PS2 with wii u and switch as mostly a “Ha, take that Nintendo. But… there are much better games to play than BOTW so…”. Suspect the answer is to just use steam rom manager and standalone installs and was leaning toward doing that when I eventually upgrade to an OLED.
But this is pretty disappointing and I would love to read more.
you could give emuze a try: https://github.com/bmsuseluda/emuze
i worked on it for about 2 years and released it a few days a go. it is a passion project of mine. maybe you like it 🙃
From your comments, it seems disingenuous to say a good number of emulator devs when it’s really only PCSX2 (and I’m not sure where that statement on refusing to cooperate originated from, which is unfortunate to see). Based off the Discord link you shared, I think you accidentally went into the conversation without a lot of key information (which can be found on EmuDeck’s wiki and GitHub repo).
EmuDeck downloads the AppImage of PSCX2 not the Flatpak. EmuDeck configures only a few things with PCSX2 (namely the renderer which was recently fixed and should now be removed in the config, file paths, and big picture mode). In addition to those, controls and hotkeys are also configured.
To be synchronous with PSCX2’s recommendations, that renderer should be flipped back to auto from vulkan, the big picture flag removed, and the paths to use symlinks instead. Other than those 3 items, there are no real erroneous configurations (that I’m aware of) that should be in disconnect with what PCSX2 wants. These configs shouldn’t affect performance at all. I may PR these 3 items sometime soon, but again these don’t cause any issues in the games themselves.
The PCSX2 auto-updater you mention being broken works completely fine, I don’t know why it doesn’t work on your end. Anyway, I’m not sure of any major conflict with other dev teams. And hopefully a PR with the above fixes should get EmuDeck back in good graces with PCSX2.
And to re-affirm, it’s really important to go into a support conversation understanding the tools you are using, the Discord conversation linked is sort of a hot mess of misinformation (since PCSX2 likely doesn’t use EmuDeck to use their own emulator, the user should know what they’re using to best receive support).
I recommend retrodeck. They seeme to really care about emulating. And the devs really talk to pieople all of the time. They need help with more devs to support their work.
The steam deck can handle every game on every system from the PS2 and back, most games on the switch and PS3, smattering of Xbox and 360 and everything on PC barring the most graphically intensive AAA titles. Recommendations on that potential scope can go on forever.
If you like Zelda there are a few titles regarded as “must play” in the series, including Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Twilight Princess and many more in the “A” tier of Zelda titles. You’ve got probably years of play time just in those.
I would just like to throw in that that PC port of OoT is maybe the best way to enjoy that game on deck. The only downside is no retro achievement support.
How can you play it? I’ve never beat OoT and I’d love to do it on the deck.
You use your own rom and run it with Ship of Harkinian, which allows you add right stick camera controls, better button mappings, and mods for things such as graphical enhancements.
I don’t know how easy it would be to find, but if you manage to get SoH up and running on your deck, I made a community controller configuration for it called “Ocarina of Time - Harkinian Deck: C-button Radial, Config Toggle”.
Basically it works like this:
Right touch pad = “C-button” radial menu
- Remaps LB, Y, RB, and L3 to a C-button-themed radial menu as Left, Up, Right, and Down respectively.
(You will need to remap your C-buttons away from the right stick in Ship of Harkinian if you want to use it for camera controls. You can just use the radial menu to accomplish that.)
Select Button = “Config mode” toggle
- Summons the Ship of Harkinian Config menu.
- Changes the right analog, touch-pad, and triggers to mouse mode.
- Migrates the C-button radial system to the left touch pad so you can still use it for remapping the c-buttons.
- Pressing the button again dismisses the config menu and returns the game to normal “Game mode” controls.
(Don’t close the game with the config mode controls active or you will be stuck with config controls the next time you start the game. Be sure to quit the game with the game mode controls active.)
I made a couple tweaks, so I don’t know if those are reflected in the community config file I shared.
The PC port is called ship of harkinian
It kindof starts to snag in the GCN/PS2 era. Smash Bros Melee never gets to an adequate point for me, and Soul calibur 2 usually is fuzzy with slowdown on the windmill-esque level.
I don’t think I was able to get soul calibur 3 to work too well. The dreamcast version of PSO is much smoother than the GCN version, though GCN version is generally good enough.
Dreamcast/N64/Playstation era I’d say is the sweet spot where games aren’t going to have many issues that they wouldn’t have elsewhere.
What’s the difference between emudeck and retrodeck? I’ve been using retrodeck and enjoying it quite a lot.
As I recall, retro deck installs an emulation hub that you go into, and then choose what to emulate.
Emudeck installs a bunch of individual emulators and configures them, and also sets up roms so they show up as standalone games in your library. The end result is the games feel like steam games, and you rarely have to mess with anything showing them to be emulated titles.
Emudeck also installs EmulationStation. You can choose to access your games and not by integrating then into Steam. Just like Retrodeck.
Fubarberry
RetroDECK is a flatpak application that builds in a variety of emulators and systems into one app you can download from flathub.
We are also working on the “Add to Steam” function. You can read more about it in the links posted in other replies in this thread :)
From my experience Retrodeck tends to lose the config files a lot during updates. So far I’m yet to experience that with Emudeck.
EDIT: Apparently it was a bug and it’s been fixed almost a year ago, see the dev reply below. Don’t let my comment discourage you from choosing RetroDECK!
Greetings, RetroDECK dev here, this was a known issue that was solved on 0.6.2b (15/03/2023), now we are on 0.7.5b and that bug is only a memory. Please let us know if you encounter any issue related to your config if you will decide to try RetroDECK again. Thanks a lot for your patience :)
Pssst… Hi, got a couple questions, one’s potentially bug related, the other is feature related.
First question: when I plug a controller in and try to play something with Dolphin, many times I have to go and swap the controller in Dolphin’s gamepad setup, otherwise it doesn’t see the controller. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that way when I originally installed retrodeck (I could seamlessly go from holding the deck to using a controller on the couch), so I’m wondering if there are any settings that I might have accidently enabled/disabled that are requiring me to manually swap controllers in dolphin settings. If it helps, the steam deck shows up as Xbox 360 pad 0, my steam controller shows up as Xbox 360 pad 1.
Second question: someone else mentioned that it’s possible to use emudeck to launch games directly from steam. Is this possible with retrodeck, and if not, are you planning to implement the ability to do something like that?
Not a contest, really. Post the link I’ll check that too 👌. What retro game you play??
It’s in the Discover app, just do a search for it! I like the fact that it has a scraper for getting box art, game metadata, etc.
As for what I’ve been playing, recently finished Jet Set Radio Future and I’ve been playing Luigi’s Mansion and Super Mario Sunshine, along with some og Animal Crossing (I love that the villagers have no problems with insulting you).
http://retrodeck.net/ I’ll check it.
Emudeck was my main reason for picking up a steam deck. Figured I could get an archive of retro games, and then build up a library of indie games over time.
I have to do some troubleshooting to get PS1 and PS2 games working, but that is probably just getting bios files. Just downloaded so many games that I am working through that even when something doesn’t work immediately I have more than enough options to be entertained.
I’m unsure of the viability of this suggestion but epsxe has always netted good results for me (Ps1, android). I’d like to think installing it on Steam wouldn’t be too problematic.
epsxe is extremely old by now and not updated. Your current best choice is Duckstation
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