Steam Deck Part 2 - Retro fun!

 

One of the things that prompted me to finally buy a Steam Deck was the lure of running emulators on it. For a long time I've been running various things on an old Raspberry Pi 3 (which has been doing a pretty good job) but sometimes things just won't work, or they are too slow and broken to play. 

Various old pals from the Eurogamer days had been bigging up the Steam Deck's capabilities, so it was too tempting not to try. All legal and above board, of course! When you've spent the equivalent of a small fortune on games over the years, and have a junk cupboard full of physical media, it's almost like the industry OWES you the right to a bit of emulation fun, no? 

First off was trying out stuff like MAME. Sure, I don't own all those arcade cabinets but have had MAME in one form or another for a long time, and love dipping into classic old arcade blasters. MAME works brilliantly on the deck, in fact a lot of games that hadn't previously worked now run smoothly and faultlessly on RetroArch Mame. 

Then I started to dig into the history of stuff I've previously owned. N64 games are playable, with a few glitches here and there (mostly audio). So cross those off the list. 

Lightweight stuff like Nintendo DS etc - no problem, though obviously some functions like the DS stylus and microphone are a bust but ithe deck still does a good job of running most things without issue. 

I carried on working through the capabilities of the deck, even finding some success with emulating old Playstation 1 titles - again games that I have stacked in my junk cupboard along with the first PSX itself, but being able to play these 'on the go' once again was great, and reminded me just how forgiving we all were back then of those chunky pixellated polygons. 

There are a few faffs and annoyances with emulation on Steam Deck, mainly the fact that everything gets lumped into your library but is thankfully sorted into collections which helps a lot. Some controls don't work, and some older home micros (like the C64 and Spectrum) are a bit impractical unless you've got a handy dinky bluetooth keyboard to hand (I tend to run the deck via controller or at a push with a mouse, so I guess a bluetooth keyboard is on a future purchase list). 

There are still many things I'd like to try. I would love to get Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Saturn working smoothly but Saturn emulation is still a bit sketchy as is Dreamcast emulation, another potential goal. Other consoles such as the PS2, PS3 (oh god, portable Motorstorm, yes please) might be beyond the capabilities of the Deck - It's powerful but not superpowered after all. 

So if you're considering getting one for games on Steam that's all well and good, but if you've ever been into retrogaming and emulation, this thing is an absolute must.