Look here, this is my Steam Deck and I play PS2, PS3, Wii U, GameCube and Switch games on it. And look how pretty the selection menu looks. Here with package photos, screenshots, videos for each of the thousands of games. In this video I'll show you how you can do this, not just on the Steam Deck, but it also works on almost all other computers. I'll also tell you which console emulations work how well on the Steam Deck and, above all, why I think many old computer and video games can be played better on the Steam Deck than on original hardware. Stay tuned! Dear hackers, dear internet surfers, welcome here to... Yes, with the Steam Deck you can really relax and you'll be even more relaxed when data traders no longer trade your data. This video is sponsored by Incogni. Incogni is a service that automatically frees your personal data from the clutches of data traffickers. Yes, unfortunately there are hundreds of data traders who have either legally or even illegally gotten your data from server break-ins and then sell it. If you sometimes wonder why your full name is in spam emails, yes, it may have been bought from data dealers. With GDPR etc. there is the possibility of objecting to data usage, but then you would have to write to each individual company. Incogni takes this work off your hands and deletes you fully automatically from hundreds of databases. Here, this is what it looks like. If it says "Suppressed", that's best, because that means that you are on the "Never save anything again" list with this data provider. And that's nice. With the coupon code "CT3003" you get a 60% discount on the annual discount at incogni.com/ct3003. Advertisement End Yes, I like old video games. We have already made a number of videos about this here at 3003. Including one where I tested three emulation handhelds or Raspis or thin clients with emulation. In the meantime, I have found the ultimate emulation game console for me , namely the Steam Deck. The most important reason for this, I think, is that the thing just feels great. Everything is robust, not as flippant as the Nintendo Switch, for example. And I also like that the thing is so big because I have big hands too. Performance, battery life, I think everything is completely okay. And you can easily connect the part to a television or projector via a docking station if you want the image to be really large. Yes, and now with the OLED Steam Deck the whole thing has become a bit better, even if I will definitely not be replacing my old LCD Steam Deck. I'm still waiting for a major hardware update. But how exactly does emulation work on the Steam Deck? I tried this out for you in great detail and tested several emulation options. First of all, you don't have to install a single emulator manually. This all happens automatically. All you have to do is copy ROM and BIOS files to it and then you're good to go. Option number 1, EmuDeck. Probably the most popular method, at least according to Google, i.e. if you google “emulation on Steamdeck”, is EmuDeck. This is a script that automatically installs multiple emulators and EmulationStation Desktop Edition . This is a frontend that offers you a uniform and very stylish selection menu for the individual systems and games. Including screenshots, videos, photos of the game boxes etc. etc. You can even look at instruction books in the menu if you want. The biggest advantage of EmuDeck is that you can easily add individual emulated games to your normal Steam Deck menu. So, for example, you have Crazy Taxi on the Sega Dreamcast as an icon next to Cyberpunk 2077 in the Steam deck menu. For me, however, that's out of the question at all because I'm more of an emulation collection type and I 've been working on a curated best-of collection for years, there are thousands of games in it and of course I don't want my Steam Deck menu shoot up. I'd much rather have them in You can start your own emulation environment, just in EmulationStation. Simply because with large collections it offers the enormous advantage of being able to display a video preview directly here. This means you can get some great inspiration while browsing through your own collection . This just doesn't work normally in Steam at first. But EmuDeck also installs EmulationStation, so you don't have to add the games to the Steam Deck menu. But what bothers me about EmuDeck is that you simply can't get it down from the system because it's a script that installs dozens of things on the Steam Deck and you then have to remove them all manually. I once had a problem with EmuDeck and the result was that I reset the entire Steam Deck. Which isn't so bad because, for example, most of the save games are saved in the cloud, but it was still annoying and, above all, inelegant. The makers of EmulationStation-DE also recommend against EmuDeck because it leads to a non-standard installation. Option number 2 – Batocera.linux The other extreme compared to EmuDeck is a Batocera installation on a microSD card that is completely separate from the rest of the Steam Deck software. Batocera is a Linux distribution designed just for game emulation and where everything is beautifully pre-configured. We also made a video about it. Yes, and Batocera now also explicitly supports the Steam Deck. The way it works is that you simply prepare a MicroSD with Batocera and then boot into it if you wish. This is then completely isolated from the rest of the Steam deck. If you take out the MicroSD, there is nothing left from Batocera. It sounds good at first, but in my opinion it has several disadvantages. So you always have to laboriously reboot the Steam Deck and then either use a specially installed boot menu or hold down the volume down and briefly press the power button to get to the internal boot menu. I could still live with that, but what really annoyed me was that the Steam Deck menu on this button, which has become second nature to me, doesn't exist in Batocera. So I can't even briefly adjust the brightness or throttle the CPU to save battery. This doesn't work the way it normally does on the Steam Deck. That's why Batocera on the Steam Deck is a no-go for me so far. Option number 3 - RetroDECK. So now comes the variant that I decided on on my Steam Deck. The whole thing is called RetroDECK and can be installed with one click. The whole thing is a so-called flat pack. You can simply download this in the desktop mode of the Steam Deck using Discovery, the pre-installed App Store. You just search RetroDECK, by the way, if you don't want to connect a keyboard, you can type in a text field and then press the Steam together with the X button. A virtual keyboard will then appear. Yes, then just search for RetroDECK and press Install. Complete. Because this is a Flatpak, it runs in an isolated environment, so it can't mess with the rest of the system. You can also easily uninstall the whole thing in Discovery with a tap on Remove without leaving any residue. Yes, and the makers of EmulationStation Desktop Edition also recommend RetroDECK, even if it is currently significantly less popular than EmuDeck. But in general it is very important anyway: The differences between the three systems I have mentioned here all only relate to the installation and a few small things. All three systems, EmuDeck, RetroDECK and Batocera, have EmulationStation-DE integrated as a selection menu and largely use the same emulators. The feel of the game is generally identical. You can't say that Emulator XY now runs better under Batocera than under RetroDECK. It could just be that the version of the emulators is slightly different, meaning that one system releases an update earlier than the other or perhaps configures it slightly differently. But actually it's irrelevant. So you can We always make it so that things actually all work the same way. In this video I explain to you step by step how to install RetroDECK. But before that , I'll show you what you can expect in terms of performance, i.e. which systems and which games run on the Steam Deck. Yes, you can first say that all home computers and all consoles up to and including the 6th generation run completely without any problems. So C64, Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 2600, NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Playstation 1, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, no problem. Make the Steam Deck casually, with super low system utilization. So here you can see, for example, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on Playstation 1 and it runs at a paltry 5 watts. My Steam Deck battery would then last over 8 hours. The only problem candidate in the 6th generation is the Xbox. Not all games run smoothly. And this applies to most consoles from the 7th generation onwards. So for example PS3, you can play many titles, for example Demon's Souls, quite flawlessly. Others sometimes jerk. It is also clearly noticeable that the Steam Deck has to work harder for PS3 emulation. The power consumption goes up to 18 watts. The Wii U, on the other hand, works pretty smoothly. Most of what I threw at it went there . And you can even emulate Switch games pretty well . But not all of them run 100% smoothly. You just have to try it out a bit. But I honestly have to say, listen to Nintendo for a moment. And of course we're only talking about games that I actually own. There are some Switch games that I prefer playing on the Steam Deck rather than the Switch. Simply because I think the hardware is nicer. Yes, you have to try it all out a bit. And the only thing I can tell you that doesn't work well at all is all Xbox games from Xbox 360 onwards and Playstation 4. So everything else. There are always a few exceptions where something doesn't work. But in general it works. So, how exactly is it installed? So you go into desktop mode, so switch the Steam button on/off to the desktop, then to Discovery. Then look for RetroDECK. As I said, you can show the keyboard with the Steam key and X. And then click Install here. Wait a bit and then start here with Launch. You can then choose where you want to store your data, i.e. ROMs and BIOS. So either on the internal data storage of the Steam Deck or the MicroSD card. I did it on the internal storage. It's all in my home folder in the RetroDECK folder. Yes, and once RetroDECK has messed around a bit, all you have to do is add the program to Steam. You make that clear in Steam. So not in the Steam Deck menu of the Steam Deck, but in Steam in desktop mode. Go in there and then add another game to my library under Games on Steam. Then you select RetroDECK. And what comes next is optional, but definitely looks nicer. Because at the moment the RetroDECK entry in Steam is simply text-only. Maybe you want a nice icon. To do this, install the “BoilR” program in Discover and you can then automatically download the images for non-Steam apps. I won't show you that in detail because it's just optional. But I have linked instructions for you in the description. Yes, and then you have a nice RetroDECK icon in the Steam Deck menu. So it looks like a real Steam game. So now all you have to do is get the ROMs and BIOS on Steam Deck. For me, I have my ROM collection on an external drive. I simply connected it and then copied it into the RetroDECK ROM folder in desktop mode. Each system emulated by RetroDECK has its own subfolder in the ROMs folder. The corresponding ROMs then have to go in there. And in each of these folders there is always a Systeminfo.txt file. This is very practical because you not only see the system that is being emulated, fully spelled out, but also the supported file types. So for the Wii U alone there are eight different formats that the emulator can read. By the way, if you have decided to install on MicroSD, RetroDECK will also create the empty folders during installation . So you can't really do anything wrong, you just have to copy the ROMs into the appropriate folders. If you don't want to mess around with cables and disks, you can also upload the ROMs to Steam Deck via network with SCP. But you have to activate SSH for this. I've linked you to how to do this in the description. Very important, if you're now wondering, where can you get legal ROMs? We've already made a video about this, which is available here. And BIOS files, legally difficult, so I just say google “batocera bios pack”. So, once you've done all that, you can get out of desktop mode using “Return to Gaming Mode” at the top left. And then start RetroDECK. Now you can actually start playing, but you want it to be nice. So with screenshots and videos for every game. That's why it's best to let the so-called scraper run over there. It automatically fetches the image and video files from the internet for each game. In my tests, I found Screenscraper.fr to be the best source. It 's best to get a free account so you can download more. And then in RetroDECK press the menu button once on the Steam Deck, here at the top left. Then on Scraper, under Account Settings, enter your account details, which you have just created. And then under Content Settings simply tap what you want. I always download everything. I think it's great that you have the manuals with you for many games, for example. But be careful, this can get big. In my game collection, these image, video and PDF files alone are dozens of gigabytes in size. But it looks great. You can also choose a theme for Emulation Station using the menu button and UI settings . I think Art Book Next is the prettiest, but if you want you can make it look like this too. Or so. Or whatever. Ah yes, very important thing. If you like achievements and trophies as much as I do, then check out RetroAchievements. These are achievements thought up by the community for old games, even very old ones. Here, for example, are the ones for Pitfall from 1982. To do this, however, you have to create a free account at RetroAchievements.org. Then go back to the menu button at the top right, then to RetroDECK Configurator, then Global Presets & Settings, then enter RetroAchievements Login and your account details . And while you're there, you can turn on Rewind enable in “RetroArch: Presets & Settings”. This allows you to rewind. So now let's see what it looks like for me. I go to the Playstation menu, start Castlevania: Symphony of The Night and boom it says that the RetroAchievements are active. I've already got 10 out of 106 and my last score is loaded straight away. So I'm immediately in the game and don't have to go to the menu and then select the score and wait like on original hardware. And now it gets even cooler. If I hold down L2 and then R4 I can rewind. Even though I've only just loaded the game. However, the emulator remembers my previous game progress. So yes, you can always rewind if you want. But you can also fast forward with R2 and R4, which can also be super useful. For example, where you can't cancel any lame phases or cutscenes. Yes, if you press down the two analog sticks at the same time, you will come to the so-called RetroArch menu, where you can do all sorts of things. For example, activate video effects if you want a retro scanlines look or create save games manually and so on and so forth. You can also operate things with this wheel menu. You can do this by lightly pressing the left touchpad. Personally, I don't find it that easy to use, but give it a try. Oh well, if All this rewinding and savegame stuff is cheating for you, of course it's all optional. You can also turn all of this off. But I like using it because it allows me to play very difficult games that I otherwise wouldn't have enough patience for. But as I said, you don't have to do it. And something else important: Everything I just explained, i.e. the RetroArch menu, rewinding save games, is only possible with emulators that run within the RetroArch structure. That's most of them, but for newer consoles there are only so-called standalone emulators that run on their own and are not integrated into the RetroArch system. This means that these cross-system functions do not work here. For example, these are the PS3, Wii U and the Switch emulators. And another little tip. In all Emulation Station menus you can jump 10 entries up and down with L1 and R1 and all the way up and all the way down with L2 and R2. This is useful for very long lists. My conclusion. So for me the Steam Deck is currently the best universal gaming console. Simply because I think the feel of the part is great and because thanks to the many extra buttons, especially these rear L4, L5, R4, R5, you can assign frequently used functions very comfortably. So just fast forward, save, bring up the on-screen keyboard on the screen and so on and so forth. Yes, and the fact that this additional function even exists means that for me, for example, I play PlayStation 1 and prefer to play on the Steam Deck than on a real PlayStation. Yes, and if I'm honest, not just because of the convenience function, but also because of the RetroAchievements and because I often prefer playing on handhelds than on the television. So I think it's really great and I can really recommend it to you. Just looking after and maintaining the game collection is fun, but so is playing the game itself. how do you see it? Like me too? Or are you only interested in original hardware or low-latency FPGA stuff? We 've already made a video about it. Feel free to write in the comments. Bye!
