BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
The Steam Deck is already the emulation system of my dreams
It's not just a portable PC. It's a portable retro console wonderland.
www.pcgamer.com
This desktop comes with a pre-installed app store just like macOS and Windows (except everything here is free). It's called Discover, and it's conveniently pinned to the taskbar.
And all the emulators I wanted are in there, installable with a click:
There are some other emulators available in Discover, too, including mGBA for the Game Boy Advance and Citra for the 3DS. The best bit is that these aren't just one-off executables you're installing—when new builds of the emulators are released, you can update with a single click, too. It's honestly a godsend. Because of the way Valve set up the partitions and file permissions on the Deck, installing emulators or any other software via the terminal is pretty locked down unless you have some serious Linux skills.
- Dolphin, for GameCube/Wii
- DuckStation, for PlayStation 1
- PCSX2, for PlayStation 2
- PPSSPP, for PlayStation Portable
- Yuzu, for Nintendo Switch
- bsnes, for the Super Nintendo
Once I had my chosen emulators installed, I launched the desktop version of Steam and used the "Games > Add a non-Steam game to my library" menu to add each emulator to Steam so that I could access it from the SteamOS interface. (One note here if you're also installing Duckstation: it has two interfaces, and "DuckStationNoGUI" is the one you want to add to Steam. It's built to play nice with controllers.)
- Most of the emulators will automatically recognize your gamepad, making input bindings easy or outright unnecessary
- The Steam controller configurator provides all the extra customization you need
- You can press the power button at any time to put the Steam Deck to sleep and your game will still work when you wake it up, even in an emulator
- The Steam menu and quick settings overlays still work
Keep in mind this is pre-launch and will only get better with time. No reason to install Windows for me now.