Steam Deck Emulation (EmuDeck 2.0) Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core today I have an emulation guide for the steam deck using a tool called emu deck now I've already done quite a few videos about Emmy deck already but they've gone through a major update recently and so this is going to document all those changes as well so this should work as a starter guide if you've never used Emmy deck before or if you're just coming back to the platform say you downloaded it previously this should help you with the update as well and as you may have seen in some of my previous videos the steam deck is an Ultimate emulating Machine just at a quick glance here this thing can emulate just about every system all the way from your old school arcade games and consoles to the more modern systems like Xbox 360 PS3 and even Nintendo switch and this guide is designed to give you all the building blocks you would need to get on your way now the way Emmy deck works is it will install all of the emulators you'd like to have on your system and it also pre-configures all of them as well so so that way you're going to have the Optimal Performance for the steam deck based on their configurations additionally it integrates with a couple tools like steam raw manager which will allow you to have your favorite games on your main Steam OS interface and then it also works with a front end called emulation station and so that's the beauty of emu deck you can have your favorite games in your main steam interface just like the rest of your steam library or if you'd like you can throw them all inside of a single app within emulation station and if you'd rather have a mixture of the two like me you can also do that and I'll walk you through all those scenarios here in this video either way by following this guide you should be able to get set up with all of your favorite emulation systems with relative ease and this might be a pretty long guide here so go ahead and grab your favorite drink we want to make sure you're nice and hydrated and let's get started [Music] okay first things first I have created an entire written guide on my website that will walk you through this entire process and the written guide is going to have more details than what we can cover here in the video so think of this video as a companion to the written guide which I will keep constantly updated from here on out and so to start let's look at some of the tools that I recommend to help you get up and running okay to start I recommend saving all of your games on a Micro SD card for cheap storage and easy access now not every card is the same for example SanDisk Ultras are A1 cards these cards are going to work fine for emulation but if you want to store PC games on them then you might want to get something faster additionally make note of the storage space as well 128 gigs I would say is the absolute minimum but 256 or higher will allow you to store more games one of my favorite brands for MicroSD cards are these Samsung ones here these are A2 speed so a little bit faster than the SanDisk Ultra ones and about the same price now SanDisk does have an A2 version of MicroSD cards it's called their extreme line and this is actually the card that I use right here on my steam deck now it's a pretty big card it's one terabyte but I also use it to store my PC games so if you want the ultimate card right now this is the best one to get now in addition to storing your games you're going to need something to be able to transfer them onto the steam deck in the first place and unfortunately if you have Windows or Mac it's not as easy as just plugging in the SD card into your computer instead of what you're going to want to do is transfer all of your games onto a flash drive or an external hard drive like you see here and then you'll plug these into the steam deck the bottom line here is that the steam deck can read Windows and Mac file systems but Windows and Mac cannot read the Linux file systems from the steam deck so you kind of have to do a little bit of reverse engineering here in that you transfer your ROMs up to one of these and then plug them into your steam deck to transfer them onto your microSD card of course there are other ways to skin this cat and get these files over onto your SD card but I found this one to be the easiest long story short just make sure you have a flash drive or an external hard drive and this is where you're going to put your ROMs to transfer to the steam deck now another thing you'll find is that the best way to move things around and get everything set up is to use a keyboard and mouse and if you already have a Bluetooth or USB keyboard and mouse you can just plug them up directly into the steam deck but if you want to use something a little bit more portable and handy you could use something like an external keyboard like this this one has its own USB dongle which means it's just plug and play either way your life is going to be a lot easier if you use a keyboard and mouse to do your initial setup finally you're going to want to have something that will allow you to plug all these things into the steam deck I recommend something like this USB hub it's going to give you HDMI out so you can plug this into a monitor and you can also plug your charger into it as well to keep your steam deck nice and charged and then of course you can plug in your USB peripherals here on the other side anyway the USB hub that I'm using right here is about 35 bucks and I think it's totally worth it now of course if you wanted a more desktop like experience you could use something like a steam deck dock like these you see here and I just did a video comparison about these four docks here which I'll leave Linked In the video description below and so now we're ready to install emu deck [Music] now just to show how much I love you guys I actually wiped my entire steam deck and started from scratch of course you don't need to do this but I wanted to make sure there were no conflicts in any previous configurations I had made and so I just wanted to start out clean for the sky either way first thing you want to do is add that SD card into your steam deck and then go into the settings section here then go into system and select format SD card from there just follow the prompt so that you wipe your SD card and it's ready to go next we're going to switch to desktop mode that's where we're going to do most of our work so in order to do that you press the steam button again go into power and then select switch to desktop now one thing I like to do when I first set up the desktop mode is to go in and make sure that my mouse behaves the way I'd expect so here we're going to go into the system settings and then workspace behavior and here under the general behaviors tab make sure that clicking files or folders is set to select them in some of the older versions of Steam OS this was actually set to a one-click open and it can be kind of frustrating if you're not used to it anyway that's the only configuration you're really going to have to do so let's jump into installing Emmy deck now for this we're going to open up a web browser like Firefox and we're just going to go to mudek.com here you can read a little bit more about the tool but we're going to go to the download section here and download the app directly by default it's going to save into your downloads folder and you should have a desktop app like this all you have to do here is just drag it over onto the desktop and then select move here and from here the installation of me deck is just as simple as a single click it's going to open up a terminal console first and then you'll see this nice new graphic user interface and this is one of those new changes that came from this recent update now when installing emu deck you have two options you have easy mode which will just configure everything for you with no input and then the custom mode allows you to customize every step of the process we're going to go through the custom mode here just so you can see all of your options first things first it's going to ask where do you want to put your games on the SD card or store them internally and like I mentioned before I recommend using an SD card it makes things a little bit more easy to manage now immeadec is actually widening their support to other devices but obviously for this one we're going to use the steam deck next Mex is going to ask you to toggle which emulators you want to have installed on your system now there's a lot of emulators to choose from here and you might be intimidated to know which one does want and if you have any questions about that then I would check out my written guide now in this video I'm not going to use every single one of these emulators so I'm going to turn a couple of those that we're not going to use off and if you'd like to install any of these later you can just run mu deck again and then choose to install them on the next screen It'll ask you whether or not you want to use the Emmy deck configurations for any of these emulators and this will be handy in case you have some personalized settings that you don't want to have configured by mudac but if you just want to take advantage of all the configuration they've already done then just leave all these on on the next screen you can add your username and password for retroachievements.org this works a lot like PlayStation trophies or Xbox achievements but for your retro games and some of these achievements are pretty awesome and they've also added PS2 support recently as well now in the next couple screens you'll see some configurations that you can choose as well for example you can choose whether or not to have game bezels on the sides of some of your retro games to take up some of that blank space on the sides Additionally you can go through and choose your preferred aspect ratio for some of these systems personally I'm a 4x3 kind of guy when it comes to Retro games and then I like to try to use widescreen hacks for anything that's 3D based so Nintendo 64 and above either way you can go through these prompts and choose your preference and you also have the ability to add shaders and filters to give your look a little bit more of a retro feel on the screen and I'm also going to show you later on in the video how to quickly change these out if you don't like the selections you made initially and last thing here you can change the look of emulation station right here as well personally I like the modern theme but the other two look pretty good as well anyway once you're done setting up your systems it's going to start the installation during this step mudek is going to install all the official emulators and then also set all those configurations that you just chose and that's about it when it comes to installing mudac after it's done it's going to give you some instructions on where to put your games and things like that but obviously we're going to do that here next in this guide so let's go ahead and close out of enemy deck and we'll get started with adding our games and bios files [Music] okay if we go into our file manager which is this little folder icon here on the bottom left and if we scroll all the way down here we'll see that there's a removable device and that's our SD card inside that card you should now see a folder called emulation and within here you'll find a bunch of subfolders that were created by emu deck inside the ROMs folder you'll see a bunch of different other folders in each of these correspond to a specific emulated system and so for example the GB folder is where you would put your Game Boy games now the other important folder is the BIOS folder this is where you're going to put some system files that are required to run specific emulators and I spent a lot of time on my written guide to make sure this was very comprehensive because this is always intimidating for new users either way if you're wondering about those bios files I have a list of all the names here on my written guide too now ROMs as well as bios files are copyrighted so you're not going to find any actual links on my website you're going to be on your own to Source your own games another handy tool is the cheat sheet from the mudek Wiki page this will show you the name of the system which emulator it runs and then the supported file systems and whether or not there are any bios that are required as well so this is a handy reference tool here additionally on my written guide I have some system specific recommendations and so what you can do here is go to the specific system you're looking for and then read about what files are going to be required within here I will explain each of the different file types and what they will typically look like and some of these more modern systems like Wii U can get a little bit complicated so I recommend checking out my guide and then also the mudek Wiki page for more details as well but at the end of the day the process is pretty simple you're going to move all of your games onto an external drive like you can see here on the right and then you just want to copy them over onto the Emmy deck ROMs folder so for example on the left side I'm going into the Game Boy Advance folder here on mudek and then I'm copying over the games for my external drive onto that and that's really it you just want to rinse and repeat for all the systems that you want to add the games for in all honesty this is probably going to be the longest part of the process because you're going to need to find the games and then it will take take time to transfer some of those larger game systems over as well either way yes this is the process here and make sure you consult those written guides in case you have any questions now here is a look at my BIOS folder and I would recommend maybe taking a pause and screenshotting this if you'd like and so these are the BIOS files for most of the systems that use them this includes things like Sega CD Game Boy Sega Saturn as well as PlayStation 1 and 2. now some of the files need to be stored differently for example Dreamcast bios go in the subfolder right here and then to play Nintendo switch you need to put the prod file inside of the Yuzu key subfolder here either way once you've moved all your games and bios files into the mudek folders we're ready to actually get them added to our Steam OS and we're going to do that using a tool called the steam ROM manager foreign manager we're actually going to open up emu deck again now on the bottom right you should see a button for tools and stuff inside there there's a bunch of things we'll go over here in a minute but for now we're going to open up steamron manager it's going to ask do you really want to close out of steam and you're going to say yeah man I want to do it and so now let's focus on steameron manager you can close out an emu deck if you'd like now on the left they have something called parsers this basically says it's going to look through all of these folders to find some games the point here to remember is that any of the games that steam ROM manager finds it's going to add to your Steam OS interface and so in that regard you do not want to have thousands of Games showing up in your steam Library it's going to overwhelm you instead we're going to use a little bit of restraint and only add our very favorite systems to the main interface first things first I would toggle off that very first one which will turn off all the parcels by default and next if you like you can just turn on the emulation station one that means that all your games are going to be available within Steam deck but only through emulation station this will give you the most clean interface because it's only going to show one app now if you'd like you can also turn on the emulators that means you can actually access the emulation menu settings directly from the Steam OS interface and so I typically like to have this one on from there the systems you choose to turn on are going to be at your own discretion in essence you need to think to yourself are there any games that I want to have immediate access to on my Steam OS interface if so then yes I would recommend toggling on that system for that corresponding game for me personally I like to keep my retro systems to as few as possible but really this is all going to be up to personal taste just note that for some of these systems there are going to be multiple options available and it's all going to depend on what kind of file type you used for your ROMs either way once you've selected all of your systems go up to the top section here select preview and then generate app list from here the tool is going to look through all those systems that you toggled on and then find all those games and it'll take a minute to kind of run through all this as you can see here it found 176 different emulators and games that I had selected you'll also see a countdown here of remaining providers this is just the name that they use for the different images that they're downloading from the database anyway once that's done running through the process I would go up here to select type and then change it to posters and these are going to be the main box Arts that you will see when navigating through the Steam OS interface if you see any images that you're not really a big fan of what you can do is hover over it with your mouse and then choose different ones based on your own preference so for example I don't really like this Prime hack one so I'm going to change it to this one here instead now bear in mind that you only need to really change the box art for the games you actually want to store on the Steam OS interface by default it's going to show you every single game within that folder even if you only want one or two of them from there and so if there's a game that you don't plan on having there and you don't like the box art it doesn't really matter because we're going to get rid of it here in a minute so again I'm just going to focus on the games I actually want to have showing up in my steam interface now sometimes you're going to find that there is missing box art or a mismatch between the game and the box art you would expect for example here with Ridge Racer for the PSP it's showing me the PS1 box art instead to fix this we're going to add our own box art we're going to go to steamgriddb.com from here you can search for the name of the game and then find the box art that you would like so instead of using the PS1 imagery that you can see here we're going to go down and use the one for the PSP and so I kind of like this white boxer right here so I'm going to click on it here then I'll select download and then right click on the image and select save image as here I'm just going to change it to the name Ridge Racer so I can identify it later and then save it back in Steam ROM manager I can just go ahead and click on that little icon on the bottom left and then I can select my downloaded image from there I can toggle through the options find the one I downloaded and here we are so again this might take some time to really curate it but that's the process here once you're happy with how everything looks the next thing you want to do is go and select save app list and the first time you do it it may take quite some time maybe upwards of 10 minutes and so what I recommend doing is go into the event log and wait until it says done adding and removing entries once you've done that we have now added all those games to steam so let's open up the Steam app next and trim the list down to something a bit more manageable if you go into the library section here on the left column you can see that it has everything listed that we just grabbed from steam raw manager that means that all 176 titles are now appearing here and this isn't going to be the most elegant solution in the world but what we want to do now is delete the ones we don't want and so what I will do here is I will hold on to the control button and then click all the ones I want to remove then I will right click and select manage remove selected non-steam games from your library and this essentially is going to remove them from your Steam OS but it won't actually touch the ROM or the file itself and so this is a quick way to remove all the games we don't want showing up in our main interface for example when it comes to Game Boy Advance the only game I want to try is Metroid Fusion so I'm going to remove all the ones above it and I can do the same with all the ones below it but okay fine I'll also add a Pokemon game but after that I'm done either way I'm just going to speed up this process here but it'll take a few minutes to kind of go through and decide which games you want to actually see in the interface and which ones you want to remove now if you ever want to add additional games and have them in the steam OS interface unfortunately you'll have to go through this process again so you'll have to run Steam ROM manager again add them all and then delete the ones you don't want that being said if you just want to add games to emulation station you don't have to do anything other than just add them to their folder by default emulation station will pick up on all those different files and then add them to the menu for you but they will only show up within emulation station not within the main steam interface so in essence two different interfaces and two different ways to get them to show up anyway once you've trimmed everything down we're now ready to actually start playing our games so let's go ahead and close out of steam here and then we're going to select return to gaming mode here on the top left this will bring us back to the main Steam OS interface and now if we go into the library section you'll see on the right we have some new tabs for example under collections we can now see all of our different systems now during this process I didn't add any PS3 or Xbox games so I can just press start and then select remove collection and so that's one way to access your games but there's also a tab that says non-steam up here on the top right within here we can navigate through through all of our emulators and games at once and as you can see I trimmed down the number from 176 different files down to 51 by going through this process and so now I can browse through all of my different ROMs that I have in my front end and I can start up these games but of course this main interface is only going to show the ones that I kept within the steam raw manager and so if I want to access every single game that I installed into my folders then for that I'm going to use emulation station and me deck actually pre-configures emulation station for you so it's as simple as just opening up this app and then you'll see all of your games that you've added to your folders from there you can navigate through the systems then select them and then navigate through those games list as well and really that's about it to get in and out of your games you can press select and start to exit out of a game and get back to this main interface and so like I mentioned before I would put only your very favorite games in the steam ROM manager section and then you can throw everything else with an emulation station and so essentially you could have thousands of retro games on your emulation station side and then only a handful in Steam OS okay okay so now that we've gone through the basic building blocks of getting emulation working on the steam deck now let's go through some of those new tools and features that are available Within munnet [Music] so back in desktop mode here every time you open up emu deck it's going to look for updates to the platform and so if you're using an older version of Emmy deck it's going to update it right here and there and there's nothing else you really need to do every time you open it up you'll have the most recent version available now once you have it open you have a couple different options for example you could go through the quick and custom updates like we did in the very beginning and you can reconfigure everything from scratch if you'd like and that process is going to be exactly the same as it was when we first got started but the other thing I want to show are the different tools that we have available within this platform so we're going to go down to the tools and stuff button here and so let's quickly go through some of these features on the left here we have the power tools plugin now this plugin is super handy if you want to get the best performance when it comes to GameCube and Wii and I'll show you that here later in the video now this plugin does require you to have a super user password if you don't have one already it'll prompt you to create one and if you do have one It'll ask you to enter it here now if you're concerned about using your password here in emu deck then it's fine you can actually just manually install power tools as well and I haven't instructions for that in my written guide this really just simplifies the process for you and it's the same thing with this other plugin here called gyro DSU this one will give you gyroscopic controls for systems like Wii U and 3DS and Nintendo switch but because it's a plug-in it also will require that super user password next up we have the mudek compressor tool what this will do is if you have any uncompressed file types for Sega CD and PlayStation and things like that it'll actually go through your folders and then compress those files for you it's going to save you a bunch of disk space next we have the option to update our emulators and so if there's just one specific emulator you want to update or there's one you don't want to have updated this is the tool you would use here now probably my favorite option is the next one here this is the Quick Settings tool here you can go through and adjust any of those bezels or aspect ratios that you selected when you first did your initial startup and so if you want to change the look and the feel of some of your games without going through the whole setup process this is the way to do it next we have a tool that can check the BIOS files you have in your system and so if you're trying to start up a game and it's crashing you can can go through here and make sure you have the right bios file next there's a tool that's currently in beta called save backup right now what you can do is link it to your preferred cloud storage system and it's going to back up all the save games for all of your games here on the cloud now eventually the plan is to actually allow this to sync so that you can pull those save games as well but for now this tool is still a work in progress either way it's pretty cool to be able to back up your saves and like we showed earlier this is how you would access the steamroll manager if you want to run that again and this is a new feature right here that they just started working on which will allow you to have emulation guides built into me neck and so this kind of works in tandem with my written guide and the Wiki page and that you can pick your system and then read about some of these special configurations here and another nice feature here is that you can reset the configuration for individual emulators and so if you were messing around with the emulator and you really mucked up the settings you can go into here and then reset the configuration to the Emu deck defaults and finally if you want to uninstall me deck then you can do that here from the tool as well but yeah that's really about it when it comes to the different tools they have currently available with an Emmy deck and I expect these to get updated over time as well so to close things out let's go over some quick tips and tricks to get the best emulation possible on your steam deck I know I've mentioned it a couple times already but let's talk about the system specific recommendations that I have in my written guide if you're running into any issues or maybe it's not performing as you would expect then I would recommend going through here here I'll have some more advanced topics like cheat codes or widescreen modifications and I'll also talk about things like having the best possible Graphics or if you wanted to add the boot logo for GameCube I'll walk you through that process too another thing I think will be very helpful are the different diagrams that have the control configurations for each emulator so for example with Gamecube I have the different button configurations so you can get a feel for what it's going to mimic from the original controller and on top of that I've added all the hotkeys as well in general you're going to use the select button as the hotkey enable button and then you'll press the other corresponding button at the same time as select to do these different hotkeys so if you want to do fast forward the game you would hold down select and then hold on to R2 and that would fast forward in GameCube mudek also has a set of secondary hotkeys these usually are going to be start and then a different button altogether so for example sample we can change the graphics resolution or the aspect ratio by pressing start and then the corresponding button on the d-pad as an example here I'm pressing start and then tapping the right button on the d-pad and as you can see I'm toggling through the different aspect ratios so that'll be super handy without having to go into the menus to do that on top of that we can press start and then up or down to change the resolution or Graphics of the games themselves this isn't going to work with every system but it will for GameCube and Wii and PS2 now for some systems there may be more than one configuration we as a great example here and so there's going to be different controller configurations depending on whether or not you want to use the Wiimote by itself or you want to use it with the nunchuck adapter or the classic controller and by the way you can swap between the different WeMo profiles by pressing select and then left or right on the analog stick and so yeah my recommendation here is if you get stuck with any of these systems then check out the written guide in addition to having my configuration options you can also go into the Emmy deck Wiki page and they'll have an entire page for that as well and hopefully between these two you'll have answers to to whatever question you have if you run into any additional problems I would recommend going through the Emu deck Discord and I'll have a link to that in my video description as well as the written guide okay moving on let's go into emulation station for a second now if you want to have this fancy box art as you're navigating through the games you're going to have to do a process called scraping in order to do that you just press start and then go into scraper within here you can adjust the configuration for your box art and it works best with a screen scraper account so you're going to want to go to this website set up a username and password and then enter it here after that you can use this tool to scrape all of your box art to get those nice pretty menus now if you're playing a retro game say for example Bionic Commando here on the NES and it's running super slow like at a half speed that's probably something that you've done within your steam deck settings so I would recommend going into the quick access menu and then under performance settings make sure that you haven't set the frame limit or the screen refresh rate to something less than 60 frames per second so that one's a pretty easy fix now for certain systems they have controller profiles that you need to enable for each game this is going to be most important for 3DS and Wii U once you start up a game you want to press the steam button then go into controller settings and then within here go into the current layout section and then find the one that corresponds to the emulator you're using that'll be cemu for Wii U and Citra for 3DS if you're using the Standalone duck station or the PSP emulator you'll want to set those as well anyway you only have to do this one time per game just to make sure that the controls are working properly one neat tool that emu deck is working on right now is currently working for 3DS and PSP and this is a nice little quick menu that you can access from the left track pad and so all you have to do is just run your thumb over the trackpad and you can do things like do a safe state or a load state or toggle on fast forward and they are hoping to expand this to other emulators in the future so now let's talk really quickly about the power tools plugin that we mentioned earlier this is the one that requires that super user password to initially install but after you've created your password and then entered it into the tool it'll now be working in your quick access menu and so here if we open up a GameCube game we press the quick access menu button here on the right you'll see the little plugin adapter here on the bottom within here we can check power tools and then for GameCube and Wii in particular I recommend turning off smt and then setting the threads to three this is going to make fewer threads and cores work with the emulator but it's also going to boost the performance of those core I also recommend going into the performance section here and then under the advanced settings you can change the manual GPU clock control for GameCube and Wii I recommend setting the frequency to 1200 and after you've made those couple tweaks basically every Wii and GameCube game is going to play at full speed even upscaled to the screen resolution that the steam done moving on let's talk about Wii U now within the cemu emulator it's very important to go into options and then Graphics Pack and then download the latest Community Graphics package from there you can go into the menus for any of these individual games and then choose some of these mods or cheats that are going to improve performance and I've listed out some of my favorites in the written guide for example with breath of the wild you want to set the frame rate limit to 40 frames per second and you can also also add things like an Xbox controller button layout as well also for Wii U I recommend going into the graphics settings and see if you can change the aspect ratio from 16x9 to the native 16x10 for the steam deck display this will fill out the game for your screen without having to stretch anything unnaturally and finally let's talk about PlayStation 3 installation because this one always seems to hang people up too first thing first you need to download the PlayStation 3 firmware directly from the Sony website and all this is linked in the written guide next you want to open up the PS3 emulator and then go install firmware and then grab that file it'll take a minute to install the firmware and now you're good to go now personally I like to use PKG titles for my PS3 games and those need to be manually installed so you'll go into file and then install pkgs I just have a couple random games right here so I'm just going to select all of them and then select open and it'll take a minute but this will basically install all those PKG files now many PKG files will not work on their own they also are going to need something called a wrap file so make sure you have the wrap files that correspond to the PKG ones as well and installing those is the exact same process we'll go up to file and then install wrap or PKG then navigate to wherever you've stored all of your different wrap files you can select all of them here and then select open after that your PS3 games are going to work just fine and they'll also start showing up in mudek and the steamroll manager okay I could probably talk about Emmy deck all day but I think I'm going to close it off right here hopefully this video was very helpful in getting you started with emulation on your steam deck and like I keep mentioning you know make sure you check out that written guide as well as the Emmy deck Wiki page to make sure you have the most up-to-date information and like I mentioned before if you run into any problems after that then I would go to the Discord page so let me know what you think about emulating games on the steam deck in the comments below and as always thank you for watching be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 1,232,943

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Id: rs9jDHIDKkU

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2022