Steam Deck Emulation is EASY! Beginners Guide!

hey guys I'm Chris the steam deck guy and in this video I want to talk to you about emulation and specifically emud deck emud deck simplifies the entire process of setting up emulation on your steam deck and it's an entirely fan-made project it not only installs the emulators but it takes care of all the configuration specifically tailored for the steam deck so all of the controls will be configured all of the settings will be adjusted you will get hot keys and much much more if you have ever used retro walk or other emulators you'll know that configuration is what takes the longest amount of time so this is a huge time saer and it's really useful for complete beginners to get up and running with emulation on their steam decks so how do you install em deck well in this video I'll be walking you through the entire process step by step but before we do that the first question you need to ask yourself is which systems and which games do you want to emulate several systems require a bios and legally these must be downloaded from the original Hardware various emulator websites have guides on how to do this but those won't be discussed in this video likewise you'll need to legally obtain the games you want to play or ROMs I should say and again there are various websites showing you how to do this the very first step you'll want to do is to organize your ROMs and your bios files and the best way to do this is on a PC or a Mac so do some research on how to obtain the ROMs and bios files organize your library and then you'll be in good shape each emulator will support various different file formats and these will also vary from system to system to help you know which file types are supported for each system and which systems require a bios you'll want to refer to the UDC cheat sheet which you can access from the UDC website there is also a direct link in the description I'd encourage you to read through the Meed FAQ and the Meed cheat sheets because these will go into a lot more detail than I'll be covering in this video for example let's say you want to emulate Sega Dreamcast well using the cheat sheet you can find it listed under the Sega section and you can see all of the supported file types I can also see that Dreamcast has a bios for Dreamcast this is actually optional and you only need it if you want to see the Dreamcast boot logo but generally all CD based systems require a bios for the game to even boot let's pick another example let's go with the Nintendo switch in the cheat sheet you'll find Nintendo switch listed under the Nintendo section and you'll see all of the different file types that are supported and then under bios you'll see that a prod. keys file is required if you followed other online guides on how to legally back up your Nintendo switch games and firmware then you'll have all of these files available and shouldn't run into any issues we can simply put these files into a folder for now on our computer computer ready to copy over to our steam deck later once you have all of your ROMs and bias files organized on your computer we can now go to our steam deck and start installing Emy deck on your steam deck we need to switch over to desktop mode if you have never done this before click the steam button underneath the left trackpad and then go down or click up which is quicker to go to the bottom of the menu and select power you can then select desktop mode after a few moments you'll be taken to the desktop to download EDC we need to open up our web browser if you've never accessed desktop mode before then you'll be prompted to install fir Fox of course you can install other web browsers such as Google Chrome if you prefer but for this video I'll be installing the default Firefox once Firefox is installed click it from the taskbar to launch it and then navigate to edc.com along the menu at the top click the download button then right click the link and select save as then from the left select select desktop and click save once downloaded you can close the web browser double click the downloaded file from your desktop and click continue wait for it to do its thing and you'll be presented with a welcome to IDC screen this is a graphical user interface that will guide you through the entire process but I'll walk you through it step by step so you can't go wrong you have two options easy mode and custom mode I'll be guiding you through the custom option because it allows for more personalized settings click continue you'll then be asked to select your ROM directory this is where the game and bios files will be stored typically most people install their games on a Micro SD card but you can also install the games to internal storage if you prefer don't worry if you change your mind later or run out of space there is a useful tool to murate from one to the other that I'll show you later in the video please note if you are using a brand new micro SD card you first need to format it over in gaming mode you do this from the system menu if you have already been using your micro SD card to store Steam games that's not a problem just make sure that you've left enough space for your emulation games for this guide I'll be selecting the SD card and selecting next for device we obviously select the steam deck and click next you were then asked to confirm which emulators you want to install for a beginner I'd stick with the defaults but to give you an overview retroarch is a multi-stem emulator and so it will be used for the majority of older systems but for some systems IDC gives you the flexibility to decide if you want to run a game through retroarch or the dedicated emulator also some systems don't work with retroarc at all so you'll need to use the dedicated emulator dolphin is the Gamecube Emulator Prime hack is a modified version of dolphin specifically made for the Metroid prome Trilogy it has support for keyboard and mouse and other useful features PP sspp is a PSP emulator duck station is for PlayStation 1 although I tend to use the Retro walk version melon DS is yeah you guessed it Nintendo DS Citra is 3DS pcsx2 is PlayStation 2 rpcs3 is PlayStation 3 Yuzu is switch Rinx is also for Nintendo switch but I prefer using Yuzu so I won't be installing this one right now zimu is Xbox 360 seu is Wii U mupen is for N64 although I typically use this version for through retroarch instead so again I won't be installing this one emulation station is a front-end interface for launching your games I'll talk about this later but it's really useful for launching your older systems particularly if you have a large collection of games MIM is for arcade games but I'll be running these through retroarch so we don't need to install the standard emulator V 3K is you guessed it Playstation Vita and scrum VM is for classic point and click games I won't be using many of these emulators such as the PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 and Playstation vaita but the emulators don't take up much storage space at all so I'll leave them selected as I may decide to use them later you may only want to select the emulators that you'll actually be using and don't worry EMC makes it easy to read any of these emulators if you later decide you want to add or remove any click continue and then you'll be asked to confirm which emulators you want to configure in most situations keep them all selected and Meed will install the D default Ed configuration for each one however if for example you already have one of these emulators installed and maybe you've already configured it to exactly how you like it then you may choose to not install the configuration for that specific emulator since I have installed all of these fresh I'm going to keep them all selected and click continue the next few options are all personal preference for the systems listed if you want the game to autosave when you exit then you can enable that here when you relaunch the game name it will auto resume where you left off pretty neat the video here shows how it works click next if you have a retro achievement account this is where you can log in I don't have an account so I'll click continue but retro achievements is exactly as it sounds for many of your retro games you can obtain achievements and badges as you play think PlayStation and Xbox achievements it's a similar experience go check out retro achievements. org if you want to find out more for the mentioned systems you can choose to have game B displayed to fill up the screen personally I like bezels and the ones included are pretty neat so I'm going to select to turn these on and click continue for screen ratios again this is personal preference I'm going to stick with the original 4x3 ratios and you can always change these later if you do decide to change your mind for GameCube you can actually change the screen ratio whilst in game by pressing start and d-pad right to toggle between 4x3 and widescreen 16x9 the the WID screen mode uses hacks so there may be some graphical glitches for some games but it's worth testing out and toggling on or off for certain games I'm a fan of shaders and scan lines for that retro look so I'm going to turn these on for handheld games 2D games and 3D games again you can change these later if you want to test them out first and this is personal preference so there is no right or wrong option you then get asked to select which theme you want to use for emulation station I like the modern theme but there are many additional themes that you can download through emulation station directly so it really doesn't matter which one you select here click next you will then get a summary of everything that emid is going to do now is your chance to go back if you want to change any of your selections but don't worry you can easily go back and change these later as I'll show you later in the video click finish and then go grab a coffee and wait for it to do its thing as it can take a while to get everything set up and ready you'll get this post installation summary to confirm everything has been installed and then you can click add games this is the part where we copy our games from our computer to the steam deck remember all of that prep work that we did at the start of the video well this is going to save us a lot of time particularly with the new USB transfer tool that was implemented in the latest release of EMC what we are going to do here is grab a USB drive or form drive and connect it to our steam deck you may need a USBC adapter or hub for this part and it doesn't matter if you already have files on the drive these won't get lost but it does need to have enough space to store all of your games and bios files when you're ready click the icon which will open up a window here select the drive that you've just inserted in this example my foam Drive is called New volume select it and then select okay then click the create ID deck folders on USB drive button once that's finished eject the drive from your steam deck and insert it into your PC or Mac open the drive and you'll now see two folders one is called bios and the is called ROMs if you already had files on this drive these will be untouched we now need to copy the BIOS and ROM files from our computer to the relevant folders on the USB drive to help with this we again can reference the cheat sheet so let's walk through this step by step so you can't go wrong the first system I want to add is Sega Dreamcast so I'll open up the cheat sheet find Dreamcast and I can see that Dreamcast ROMs go into a folder called Dreamcast easy so let's copy over the game if you do have multiple games then of course you can copy them over in bulk next we need to copy over the bios for Dreamcast per the instructions in the cheat sheet we need to put the BIOS in a folder named DC in lowercase so let's do that once done we can then move on to our next system according to the cheat sheet for Mega Drive these can either be placed in the mega drive folder or Genesis folder so let's do that and I can see that for Mega Drive no bios files are required so this is an easy one you'll quick realize that the folder names are pretty self-explanatory and you'll only need to look at the cheat sheet for guidance on where to place the BIOS files thankfully only a handful of systems do require a bios switch Wii U and 3DS have key files and these are required to play encrypted games so be sure to check the sheet sheet to find out where to place these files for Nintendo switch the prod. keys file needs to be placed in the Boos Uzi and keys folder whereas for the Nintendo Wii U the keys file is placed in the ROM's Wii U folder this should be relatively straightforward because we had already organized our collection of BIOS and ROM files at the start of the video once you're finished copying over your bios and run fals you can then eject the USB drive and insert it back into your steam deck be sure to click the button to mount and open when prompted back over in Emy deck within the transfer tool you now have an additional option to copy over the games so let's click that button and wait for it to do its thing now the thing to note here is that this isn't doing anything particularly sophisticated it is simply copying the folders from the USB drive over to the micro SD card or wherever you selected to install your games you could do this manually but the benefit of this method is that it lets you organize your files on your computer which is a little easier than trying to do it on the small steam deex screen using touch controls we are now done with the edex setup and all that's left to do now is to add our games to steam so that we can launch the games through gaming mode this is where steam ROM manager comes in and it's a useful utility to do this in bulk in just a few clicks you can launch steam ROM manager from here but before I show you how that works I'll walk you through some additional mck options so I'm going to click skip for now and I'm also actually going to close mck down entirely what we can now do is delete the installer because we don't need that anymore and to relaunch emck just double click the emck icon again on your desktop whenever you relaunch emck it will check and install any updates and then it will take you to this screen this is where you can access all of the tools and settings starting with the top left the USB transfer wizard is the tool we just use to copy over our games from USB drive to the micro SD card you can access it here at any time for example if you do add additional games you can come back here and have emck copy them directly to the relevant folders for you like we did earlier really useful alternatively you can do this manually if we minimize emid and opened up the Dolphin browser on the left you should see your SD card listed as primary you'll also see any connected USB drive if you open up the primary drive you'll have three folders and one file the folder we are interested in is emulation within here you'll find a bios folder and a ROMs folder if you remember earlier we created the same folders on our USB drive so if you prefer to do things manually or maybe you want to remove games this is where the fils are located back over in emid the next option is quick settings this is where you can change all of the previous customization options such as bezel shaders and aspect ratio have a play and see which you prefer next is manage emulators this one is really useful and one which you should use every now and again this is where you update all of your emulators whilst muck itself does update after each time you launch it to actually update the emulators you need to come here and click update your emulators I'd recommend checking back here every couple of weeks or so you will see an orange notification next to any emulator that has an update available and you can update them individually if you prefer you can also access additional options for each emulator for example let's say I was playing around with retro walk and I messed up some of the settings well I can actually come here select retroarc and then I have the option to reset the configuration to reinstall or update it or completely uninstall it it also shows you if you have any missing bios files and also the hot Keys super use useful you can click go back to go back to the main menu the udex store is where you can download free Homebrew games and there are some really good ones here so definitely do take a look we then have some useful tools steam ROM manager I'll come to shortly quick reset is a quick and easy way to reset your entire idck installation custom reset is the same but it takes you through the custom installation process that we followed earlier power tools deck controls and gyroscope are all plugins which I'll be covering in a future video but these are really useful tools Power Tools in particular enables you to get better performance from your games particularly for emulation systems such as Wii U PS2 and switch ID compressor is a tool which compresses your ROMs I haven't felt a need to use this yet but if you do have a large collection or are running low on storage then you may want to give this a try bios Checker does exactly that it will tell you which Boos Falls you are missing Cloud backup is a way to backup your save games to a cloud provider such as Dropbox or Google Drive cloud service manager is a quick and easy way to add cloud services such as Netflix Disney Plus Hulu you can also quickly and easily add and remove Remote Play clients such as chiaki which is for PlayStation Remote Play or Moonlight which is for PC streaming Moonlight is pretty awesome so go check out my moonlight video if you're interested in checking that out retro achievement takes you back to the page where you can log into your retro achievements account migrate installation allows you to migrate your M deck installation from your SD card to to your internal SSD or vice versa you also have an option to uninstall Emy Deck with a single click which is always nice to see okay so let's get to the last step which is to add our games to desktop mode to do this we use the super handy tool called steam ROM manager and this tool is really easy to use so let's click launch now the important thing to remember is that if you do add any new games in the future then you will need to come back to steam ROM manager to get them added into gaming mode when you launch steam ROM manager manager you will get this prompt this is because it needs to close down steam so click yes and wait for it to load by default it will have All Passes selected which is fine if you only have a handful of games but if you have full ROM sets then this will add every game into steam for all the systems I'd recommend running these games through emulation Station instead and only adding your favorite games to steam click the toggle passes button to deselect everything and then go through system system to choose which systems you want to add to steam I'd recommend selecting emulation station otherwise you will have no way to launch this from gaming mode I'd also recommend selecting emulators so that you can access the emulator settings from gaming mode otherwise you do have to switch to desktop mode you'll see that some systems are listed more than once for example arcade has options for MIM Standalone retroarch Mame 2003 plus and retroarch Mame 2010 if you select all of them then you will have duplicates appear in your game library for this reason you should select only the specific emulators that you want to use for arcade games I typically use Mame 2003 Plus for PlayStation you'll see that we have the Standalone duck station emulator we have retroarch Beetle or Swan station again select the one that you want to use duck station is generally regarded as the best for PlayStation emulation if you turn on a parer but you don't actually have any games for that system then nothing will appear in your theme library for this video I'm actually going to select all passes to show you what that looks like once you have made your selection click preview and then click pass you will then start to see the artwork displayed for each one where steam ROM manager was able to detect the game or application this could take a while depending on how many games you have in your library if you don't like a particular image you can toggle through them by using the left and right arrows you can also add your own if you're not able to find something that you like be sure to also check out the banners and other artwork types A lot of Nintendo switch games have actually had the artwork removed due to copyright violations if you have specific games that you don't want to appear in gaming mode select the excluded button and then select a game and then click save these games will then be excluded and will not be added to steam if you later decide you want to add these back in then go to the main steam ROM manager screen you'll then see an exceptions button click this and then you can either select the clear button to remove all exceptions or remove them individually remember to click save to save any changes back over on the preview page once you're happy with your selections and the artwork click save to steam and wait for the done notification this could take a while if you have a lot to add once this is finished we can now close steam ROM manager and M deck and go back to gaming mode to play some retro games double click the return to gaming mode icon from the desktop back over in gaming mode go to your steam library and you you will now find a collection for each system since I did select all passes you'll see that some systems are duplicated this is why I'd only recommend selecting the parer for the specific emulator you want to use for that system as you can see Dreamcast is working just fine and it's actually autor resuming where I left off because I had enabled the save feature during the udex setup I also have 4x3 ratios bezels and scan lines if I want to change any of these settings then I can go back to emid and make some changes alternatively if I'm feeling brave I can press L3 and R3 to enter the retroarch settings page and configure the settings from here you can even configure different settings on a per game basis but this is more advanced than I'll be covering in this video trying Nintendo switch and Mario Odyssey boots up just fine there are ways to improve performance in games and I'll be covering that in separate videos but for now all we are doing is confirming that the game boots and the controls are working Sega sattin is also working fine and we get the Sega sattin boot logo a cool thing about adding games to steam is that for each game you can customize the controls in Sega rally on the Sega satton I can actually map the accelerator and the brake to the rear triggers so it feels more modern you can also set individual performance profiles per game lastly I want to show you emulation station you'll find this under the emulation collection this is a really clean front end to launch all of your retro games for large collections I'd recommend launching your games this way particularly for older systems where you may have hundreds of games if you want to add some nice artwork and information about the games including videos you can use the built-in scraper you can also change the look of emulation station with themes one of my favorites is the NSO theme which replicates the minimalistic look of the Nintendo switch online interface one thing to note is that emulation station will launch the games using the default emulator if you do want to change this press start to bring up the settings go down to other settings and select alternative emulators you can then select the system and then choose which emulator to use by default for example for PlayStation we have several options if you remember we had similar options within Steam ROM manager for each system as you can see here duck station is already selected so we don't need to make any changes so that's it for this video guys I hope you found that useful if you did please hit that like button and also consider subscribing for More Steam deck guides as always if you have any questions then feel free to ask in the comments and whilst you're here why not watch one of these videos [Music] next

Channel: Steam Deck Guy

Views: 186,812

Keywords: Steam Deck Emulation, EmuDeck, RetroArch, Dolphin, DuckStation, Yuzu, Ryujinx, MAME, Xemu, Cemu, Citra, PCSX2, RPCS3, EmulationStation, ES, Emulation Station, Nintendo Switch, Gamecube, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2, PS2, PSX, Playstation, PS1, Steam Deck Emulator, Steam Deck EmuDeck, Steam Deck Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck Wii U, Best emulation, steam deck emulation, steam deck emudeck, emulation on steam, Steam Deck Switch, retro games steam deck guy, rom manager, yuzu, emudeck steam deck

Id: xChQocfiiXc

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023