Emulation on Steam Deck OLED (is Fantastic)

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ for met gamecore today we're going to do an emulation showcase for the steam deck OLED now I'm going to play through all the major systems and show you how they perform and then also I'll give you a couple tips and tricks along the way in case you do want to play some of these games now before we get started I have a couple points number one we'll be playing everything through emud that's my favorite way of setting up emulation I have a full written guide as well as video guide for the whole process I'll leave that all link down below number two I want to try to show you the vanilla experience so I'm not going to do any advanced tweaks so we're not going to mess with the CPU or GPU configuration I'm not going to install any sort of plugins and we're not going to use cryo utilities so there is ways to e out a little bit better performance with some of these systems but I want to show you what it's going to be like out of the box once you have configured emid and then finally we'll take a moment and talk about local multiplayer so if you wanted to hook this up to a steam deck Dock and then plug it into a TV and then play with your friends and family will do all of that as well anyway we got a lot of ground to cover and I'm excited to try out all these games and so without any further delay let's go ahead and get [Music] started okay like I mentioned in the intro I do have an muud deck guide already on my channel and it's a little bit older I think I made it about 6 months ago but even then the entire guide still applies today so if you want to get set up with emulation on a steam deck I recommend checking out that video which I'll have linked down below now one resource I would recommend after you're all set up is to check out the muud Wiki page they've done a lot of work on it over the past year or so and so it's a really great resource at this point and I found that even when I have questions about getting set up they already have an answer here on the page I would say the most helpful Pages have been the ROMs and bios cheat sheet this will walk you through all the supported systems which folder to put the games in and then also what file types are accepted and they'll also tell you exactly which bios files you need to add as well well one of my other favorite parts of this Wiki is that they have individual Pages for each of the different emulators so if you're specifically looking how to set up Wii U you can check out that page and same thing with say something like Nintendo 3DS and this will help you get pretty far into the weeds for example setting up gyroscopic controls and things like that anyway that's all I did in order to get set up and configured I just followed my own guide with the steam deck OLED and then used the Wiki page for any other questions that I had and so let me give you a look at the current setup on my 512 GB OLED steam deck to start within my Steam OS Library you can see all of my different Steam games and so this will be your typical experience when it comes to playing computer games on a steam deck and then one of the best tools within emid deck is that it integrates with something called steam raw manager and essentially this will set up short cuts for your favorite retro games to appear within the Steam OS interface now I've got a lot of games here about 130 alog together and it's not just games I have links to individual emulators if I need to go into the settings and then also I have some Cloud streaming services like shiak so I can play PS5 either way as you can tell yeah I've got a lot of games going on right now and this is usually more than I would typically have generally if I'm going to put games in Steam oest it's going to be just my very very favorite so the ones that I'm going to be playing the most often however I did put a lot more on this front page mostly because I needed to use them for getting ready for this video but generally I do recommend trying to keep this as trim as possible I think about 50 games has been the sweet spot for me and then what I like to do is use a different tool to access all of the games that I have stored of my system because this right here is only going to be kind of a greatest hits collection so instead what I do is I use a tool called emulation station and this is also installed as part of the muud process and within here it's listed out every single game that I've added to the system not just the very favorites that I have within Steam OS and so the way I see it I put my very favorites within the Steam OS interface using steam ROM manager and then anytime I feel like just kind of browsing and playing something else then I'll use emulation station and of course all of this is included in that UD guide that I mentioned previously that'll be linked down below at the end of the day this is how I set up my emulation experience I put the very favorites in the Steam OS interface but I don't want to put too many cu I don't want it to be too cluttered and then if I ever want to go into the weeds and try something new then I usually will go into emulation station okay and now before we get into the actual testing let me show off a couple other elements number one I'll show these statistics here at the top and really there's probably only two things you really need to focus on on the top left will be the frames per second and then on the top right you can see the total power draw followed by the remaining battery life and so in this example here with an NES game we're pulling around 5 1/2 watts and that'll give us something around 10 hours of battery life so be on a lookout for that when I start playing these games and I'll also mention it as we go through and another thing worth mentioning is that I'm using the muud presets when it comes to my video resolution so for example within retroarch with the old pixel systems like NES they do a special trick in order to smooth out the visuals so what they do is they turn on a video filter called normal 4X and they also combine that with something called bilinear filtering and this is a preset that I've been using for quite some time on my own emulated systems especially when you have a screen that's not a super high resolution like here on the steam deck so what this does is it blows out the screen to four times the normal size and then shrinks it back down while applying a bilinear filter and I know that sounds kind of confusing but essentially what it's doing is it's rebalancing the pixels so that you have a clearer and crisper picture and the reason why this matters is because you won't be getting pixel Distortion that's when some of the pixels just look a little off and this is something that's really prevalent in lower resolution screens after all the steam deck resolution is only 800p and because that doesn't scale perfectly for integer scaling you do have to do tricks like this now there are other ways to kind of combat this you can use special shaders or overlays but for me personally I found that when combining these filters with an OLED panel it looks just fine for me and so even though I am kind of a stickler when it comes to nice Square pixels I don't really mind it on this display with those tricks anyway if you didn't understand any of that no worries all I'm really trying to say is that if you're playing an old school game using the muud configuration it's going to look good right out of the box and so that's what we'll be using for all the classic systems that I'll be showing here for the rest of the video anyway we'll start with Nintendo and Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis these are all my favorite systems of all time and one thing to note about these systems besides the pixel balance that is happening inherently within UDC another thing to note is the aspect ratio of the steam deck display as you may remember this is a 16x 10 aspect ratio which means it's going to be taller than your typical widescreen 16x9 and while that can present some problems when it comes to PC gaming it's actually really great when it comes to Retro Game emulation all these older systems played at a 4x3 aspect ratio which is going to be a lot more narrow than 16x9 and thankfully because 16 X10 is taller it's actually going to balance it out a little bit better and so you can see here that yes we're getting black bars on the left and right this is called pillar boxing but it's not quite as bad as it would be if we had a 16x9 aspect ratio display in addition because the OLED steam deck has thinner bezels it's not as prominent as it was originally on the first steam deck and so because we have a larger display with thinner bezels everything's going to be filled out a lot better and looks more impressive and then of course on top of that we have an OLED panel which means that everything's going to look really rich and vibrant and then of course we have those really deep blacks which are going to look great here too and because the CPU is made with a 6 nanometer process that means it's going to be even more efficient especially at these lower wattages and so when you're playing any of these classic games I would expect anywhere between a 10 and maybe 11 or 12 hour battery life alog together another system that looks exceptionally well on the new steam deck is going to be Game Boy Advance this one had a 3x2 aspect ratio which is going to be a little bit wider than 4x3 but not as wide as 16x9 or 16 X10 and so in this example we actually get to fill out even more screen than the 4x3 systems and so if you're a big fan of Game Boy Advance I think you're really going to love trying to play those games on the steam deck OLED it's really nice to blow up these games into such a large screen and they scale really well too okay now let's move over to arcade games and I just want to highlight here that all these old 80s and 90s Classics are going to play just fine setting up arcade emulation is a little bit more complicated because you have to make sure that you have the right ROM set that's going to match the core that you're using but again all of this is explained really well in the me deck Wiki in terms of performance I did want to mention that it does play Killer Instinct at full speed this is one of those games that's surprisingly hard to emulate so the fact that we're playing it here on the steam deck is pretty awesome okay let's move back to the Home console system starting with the 3D era so we'll start with PlayStation 1 and then work our way up and as you can imagine PlayStation's going to work just fine you can play this at a native resolution like I am right here or you can even upscale it if you'd like you also have a couple different options when it comes to emulators you can either run it through retroarch like I'm doing right here or you could also use the Standalone duct station emulator you've got a lot of choice when it comes to the system and yes these games look and play great let's move on to something that's a little bit more taxing so we're going to do Sega Saturn using the retroarch beetle core this core really focuses on accuracy so a lot of these games are going to play really well but bear in mind this core does not support upscaling so you'll have to play everything in a native resolution for me personally I prefer that especially with Sega Saturn I like those big chunky pixels however fair warning I was seeing a couple dips in frame rate here and there with the beetle core after all this is a very demanding emulator so in that regard I would say you probably can't use a lot of heavy duty shaders with Sega Saturn in the beetle core but you could always try a more performance-minded core like yasan Shiro which is going to allow you to play those shaders and still play these games at full speed either way yes Sega Saturn is going to be fully playable on the steam deck OLED okay up next we have Nintendo 64 and for this one I am going to upscale it so we're going to be playing this at a 960p resolution which is actually the default within the M deex settings so you don't have to configure anything it's just going to do it on its own either way Nintendo 64 works really well with this configuration there's going to be a couple like golden i7 and conquer bad for day which will get a little bit of a dip here and there we're talking like down to like 58 frames per second but I would still say all these games are going to be fully playable even at this upscaled resolution okay now let's move over to handheld systems we'll start with the Sony PSP and for these we're going to use a 3X or 720p resolution and given the fact that PSP was essentially a 16x9 system 720p is going to be a really good fit and when it comes to Performance every PSP game you can think of is going to play full speed at 3x resolution now it's not going to be quite as sharp as something like the Rog Ally which has a 1080p screen which can play PSP games at a 4X resolution but it's still going to look really good on the steam deck especially with the OLED panel next we'll move over to Nintendo 3DS and one thing worth noting right now is the fact that many of these emulators have a quick menu That's activated with the left trackpad and this will give you the option of doing things like save states or turning on fast forward or even exiting out of the game and in particular with 3DS you'll be able to swap out the screen layout so depending on what game you're playing you might be able to find something that's a little bit more ideal for me personally I found that the default setup works pretty well but it's always nice to have quick access to an option menu like this anyway in terms of performance a Nintendo 3DS is going to be defaulted to a 3X resolution which works really well here in fact I wasn't able to find a game that really caused a lot of slowdown I think everything that I tried was very playable and I think the steam deck's a really great system to emulate 3DS on not only is the display nice and big but it's also a touchcreen which means we can interact with anything that requires touch in addition you can configure this emulator to work with gyroscopic controls as well for the games that support it okay and the final handheld system I wanted to show off is going to be PS Vita this one we're going to run using the vaita 3K emulator at a native resolution and I got to say the results here are going to be pretty hit and miss after all the PSV emulator is still new so I would consider it to be a work in progress however I did find a couple games worked okay Dragon's Crown was actually Flawless 60 frames per second and then also wipe out 2048 gave me some pretty good visuals but had quite a bit of slowdown now unfortunately for most of the other PS VA games that I tried they did not work because of graphical issues and it didn't matter if it was a lightweight game like Adventure Time or a heavyweight game like Uncharted golden Abyss when it comes down to it I was seeing a lot of rendering and graphical issues that were a lot worse than they were on the Android and Windows version of the same emulator and again I think it's just a matter of time that the development needs to catch up and so if anything I think this is an emulator we probably need to check in on every once while and see if it improves okay next let's move over to Gen 6 starting with the Sega Dreamcast and this one's going to run at a 720p upscale via retro Mark and absolutely no problem here all the games are going to run to full speed and I think that's kind of expected even though this is technically a Gen 6 system it kind of emulates more like a Gen 5 in fact Dreamcast emulation is typically more performant than it is with Sega Saturn so either way yes 100% fully playable here on the steam deck next we're going to move over to Nintendo GameCube at a 2X upscale this is actually is still going to be a little bit more than 800p so it's going to fill out the full resolution of the display and I'm happy to report here that GameCube emulation has been vastly improved on the steam deck since the first time I tried it back last year when the steam deck first released in fact there were quite a few GameCube games that struggled on the steam Deck with its default settings but now you can see that even with an upscaled resolution we're having absolutely no issue and perfect performance not only that the power demands are relatively low about 7 Watts or lower which means in terms of battery performance would expect somewhere between 6 and 8 hours depending on the game that you're playing and when it comes to Nintendo wiii I saw similar results so I was able to play most games at a 2X upscale and still the power demands were relatively low so if anything I would say that if you have a steam deck and you tried out GameCube in Wii before and weren't super impressed I bet you would like it a lot better now another system that saw some pretty good improvements is going to be PlayStation 2 here I'm running everything at a 2.5x upscale this is also going to be over 800p so it's going to fill out the screen resolution and then some and for the vast majority games these all played at full speed even the more heavyweight games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and if you combine this with widescreen patches it's going to fill out the whole screen and look really sharp now there are going to be a couple games where you'll have to drop down the resolution just a little bit so for example with God of War 2i I dropped it down to a 2X upscale and this would give me a pretty stable experience it would dip down below 60 every once in a while but I would still consider it to be completely playable so yes in wrapping up I would say that GameCube Wii and PS two are all fully playable on the steam deck and let's move over to the final Gen 6 system it's going to be the original Xbox and the experience with this one was a little bit hit and miss there were definitely games that played at full speed like Jet Set Radio Future and there were other games that got very close for example soulcaliber 2 this one would drop the frame rate every once in a while and it was definitely something that was tangible so I wouldn't say it's a perfect soulcaliber 2 experience but still pretty great however when you get to more heavyduty games especially those 3D driving games the experience was was very mixed for example with Project Gotham Racing I got an average frame rate about 26 frames per second now in the steam overlay you can see that still saying 60 frames but right below that I have a couple windows open that are kind of hard to see but these are the video debug settings and these will actually show you the true emulated frames per second and yeah it's hovering around 26 to 30 so this game plays super slow it's about at half speed and definitely not worth it other games like fora Motorsport also played slow but then had a lot of graphical issues so this one I would considered unplayable not only that the power demands on the Xbox emulator are pretty high we're getting an average of about 15 or 16 Watts which means you'll probably get around three maybe three and a half hours of gameplay compared to the others which will give you about double anyway that's it for Xbox let's move over to Nintendo Wii U now this one actually performs a lot better in fact most games are going to play perfectly fine we'll start with Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD this one had a native 1080p resolution and even though that's a much higher resolution than we actually need with this display it's still looks really good and performs well just bear in mind the power demand for Wii U is a little bit higher so this is also around 15 16 Watts so expect between 3 and 4 hours of gameplay on a single charge and yes like I said all Wii uu games are going to play pretty well especially those that are in the middle or lightweight tier but of course I always like to test the hardest game possible as well and for this system it'll be Legend of Zelda breath of the wild now I do have a couple things going on in the back end for example I went into the Graphics Pack settings and there's an option to adjust the aspect ratio to 16x 10 and it's also at an 800p resolution so it's going to fill out the entire screen at the perfect resolution for this display and so there are a couple things going on here I have a Target frame rate of 40 frames per second but as you can see it rarely hits that it's more of an average about 35 that being said this still nice and smooth as long as you're getting over 30 frames per second it's going to be a great time however also bear in mind that this is going to increase the power demand significantly so it's going to require about 21 watts and that will drop down your battery life to under 3 hours I would say between 2 and 1 half and 3 hours is probably going to be your best bet either way I think it's going to be a great experience especially if you're a fan of this game okay next let's move over to PS3 we'll start with our lightweight games and work our way up and we'll start with a couple PSN games these are actually some of my favorite to play on the system so for example this is going to be games like After Burner Climax and outrun online arcade and both of these games will play at 100% speed absolutely no problem and the battery life is going to be great when playing these games too I get about 5 to 6 hours of gameplay now moving over to lightweight 3D games like Demon Souls these play great too in fact this game had an original frame rate of 30 frames per second but you can apply a patch that'll unlock that frame rate and so here we're playing at a stable 60 frames per second with the game so it's actually better than it was originally I also found that some racing games like Ridge Racer 7 played at full speed so if you want to play some of these PS3 era titles you might have some good luck and then when it came to what I would consider like middleweight games things like Heavenly sword which is a 3D based game but a little bit on the lightweight side this one I would consider to be playable it's definitely dipping below 30 frames per second here and there but the performance is at a point where I would say that I could still play through this game and really enjoy myself now it's not all perfect so let me tell you about a couple of the problems that I had when testing out PS3 number one is that some games just would not actually boot dead or Life 5 is a great example this would actually start loading up all the Shader cash but once it got to the end it would just get stuck and I probably tried this five or six different times and probably wasted about 2 hours trying to get this game running but in the end I just couldn't get it going and bear in mind this is the exact same configuration settings that I use with all my other testing and this is the only system I found where it actually won't boot so I did find a couple hiccups like that here or there just in trying to get some of these games working and then finally the other major compromise when it comes to PS3 is that 3D based games that are a little bit more on the heavyweight side just definitely aren't playing at full speed so for example with Prince of Persia this is one that I would consider to be like in the top 75% of the games but not really the hardest ones to run this one is still still struggling even to hit 30 frames per second and you can definitely feel that slowdown when you're playing the game so for me personally I would not consider this game to be playable and then if we move up to that even higher tier that's going to include games like Infamous and God of War 3 yeah these are definitely not playing at full speed and so we're definitely seeing a performance limitation when it comes to PlayStation 3 on the steam deck and this is probably the first clear emulation distinction between the Steam deck and the legion go and the Rog Ally because for the latter two handhelds these games will play just fine so I would say if you want to stick to the more middleweight games within the PS3 catalog yes you can play them on the steam deck but there are definitely some limitations here speaking limitations let's try out the next system which is going to be Xbox 360 now I tried a number of different games here and I couldn't get a single one to actually Boot and this is a well-known issue with steam deck and the Xbox 360 Emulator they're just not very compatible so if anything I would say don't expect to play Xbox 360 on the steam deck but you might be surprised here and there when a couple games actually play but at least in my testing with with about half a dozen games I couldn't get any to work and I did try a bunch of different types of games as well as different configurations both in Steam OS and in desktop mode but yeah nothing really worked okay and the final emulated system I wanted to show off here is going to be Nintendo switch and one caveat before we get started I just wanted to mention here this isn't meant to be a Nintendo switch replacement for me personally I like to dump my switch games onto the steam deck for a couple reasons number one I prefer to use all those emulation options that we have within Yuzu so for example I can adjust things like the anti-aliasing and then also I can Implement things like mods and sheets and then not only that I find these steam deck controls to be more comfortable to use than the actual Nintendo switch and so when I have a choice between the two I will typically play my switch games on the steam deck and then let the kids use the actual switch so let's move into the performance testing of Nintendo switch games and of note we are going to be playing everything in handheld mode it's not going to give us the highest resolution ever but it's going to be mostly 720p so it'll look great on this screen anyway when it comes to the more lightweight game games things like Super Mario 3D World Super Mario RPG these are going to play great and as we work our way up to games that are a little bit more demanding like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Legend of Zelda links Awakening we're still getting great performance for links Awakening in particular there's a lot of shaders that'll compile as you're playing the game so you'll get a couple frame rate dips here and there but this is one of those games that the longer you play the better the performance is going to be and Super Mario Odyssey is very similar in that regard but a little bit harder to play as well so this one will get some slowdown but I would still consider it to be a playable experience and I would say the experience is very similar with Metroid primary mastered yes you'll get some slowdowns here and there a lot of it has to do with Shader compilation and for me the experience is still good enough to be able to play through the game now I've also been playing a lot of Super Mario Brothers Wonder on the steam deck and this has been a great experience too but just like with the others it'll have some slowdown here and there especially when you're in a new area but the way I play this game I don't really mind it because I actually like to replay these games over and over and so yeah the first time might have a few stutters here and there but the longer you play it the better it'll get okay and finally we have this game and this one I actually played all the way through on the original steam deck so I'm pretty familiar with the experience when it comes to playing in both the sky world as well as in the Underworld you'll get a pretty solid 30 frames per second however once you get to the regular kind of over rolled area especially in the central part of the map when it's got a lot of trees and grass yes you'll probably get a little bit of slow down below 30 frames instead I found the average to be about 25 frames per second I think it's still very much so playable and one of my favorite reasons for playing it on the steam deck is the ability to implement cheats to just make the game a little bit more playable at least for me either way I can definitely attest that this game is fully playable all the way through considering the fact that I beat it on the steam deck okay before we start wrapping up let's talk a little bit about multiplayer so in this setup right here I've already paired four different controllers as you can see on the screen the yellow and purple controller are going to be paired via Bluetooth and then the dark red one is actually paired via a 2.4 GHz dongle in the USB connection at the back of my steam deck talk and then finally the white gamer controller is plugged into the back of the steam deck dock because it's wired and so I have four different controllers with three types of connection and if you set everything up in Steam deck a lot of these are actually going to work pretty much out of the box the only thing you may have to do is when you first pair up all these controllers you're going to need to go into the Quick Settings menu on the steam deck and then under these settings there will be an option that says rearrange controller order and here if you're not going to be using the actual steamex controls you want to move that down to the very bottom so in this example I have five different controllers showing up and I want to move the steam deck one down to the bottom that way I have the other four controllers available for play now after you've done that there are going to be some emulators while you have to do some specific configurations for example within dolphin I found that I couldn't get all four controllers to show up without actually doing it manually and it's pretty easy you just need to go into dolphin and then go into the controller settings and then within here you can configure each of the four ports and there's really not that much to do you just have to choose the correct controller for each player and the way I I like to confirm it is that I will select the controller and then move around the analog stick to find out which one that was and it's for this reason that I actually recommend using four different types of controllers instead of four of the same controller and that's because it can get pretty confusing when they're all named the same thing and you're trying to figure out which player is which anyway once you've done that within the Dolphin settings you should be able to play four-player GameCube right out of the box however just bear in mind that once you disconnect all these controllers you may have to go back into the Dolphin settings and make sure that the seam deck controller is your player one but other than that it's going to be a pretty seamless experience now with the Playstation 2 emulator I found it to be a little bit more complex for example you have to go into the controller settings and then enable the port one multi-tap I also found that after that I had a hard time getting all three of the other controllers to actually register so what I ended up doing is going into the controller settings and then mapping each one of them to each of the players and it's probably took me maybe 5 minutes alt together to set all four of these controllers up but after that everything worked just fine so if you have a get together or party at your house and maybe you want all the boys to play NFL Blitz 2003 this will be a great way to do it now thankfully when it comes to retroarch based emulation most of this is going to be plug-and playay so really all you have to do is just connect all the controllers to the steam deck and then make sure they're in the right priority order within the steam deck settings and then from there retro AR kind of takes care of the rest especially when it comes to arcade games it's really fun to play a lot of these four player games like X-Men and Simpsons and it's pretty awesome that we can do this on the steam Deck with relatively little issue anyway that's about it for this video just wanted to showcase the emulation potential of the steam deck OLED and as you saw the performance here is pretty incredible there are definitely still some systems that don't play at 100% speed but even so there are tens of thousands of games that you can play on this and that's not even counting all the PC games that the steam deck can run as well and I think the emulation potential is even better on the steam deck OLED because we have that beautiful screen thinner bezels and then also longer battery life and it's for this reason and many others that I consider the steam deck OLED to be the best handheld of 2023 anyway let me know what you think down in the comments below are you playing a lot of emulated games on your steam deck or are you actually just playing regular old Steam games or if you're emulating games on a different handheld let me know which one and why as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 311,660

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Id: 23ZodrKmXuw

Length: 26min 31sec (1591 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2023