Steam Deck Emulation Showcase & Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is ross from retro gamecore so this is going to be my second video on the valve steam deck as i mentioned in the first video i'm just borrowing one from a friend and in that first video i just talked about how the device feels overhaul and just some of my first impressions well for the past 48 hours or so i've been knee-deep in retro game emulation on this device and i've run it through the gamut everything from 8-bit up to ps3 and so in today's video i'm going to do a performance showcase for each of these systems and i'll also talk a little bit about the experience in terms of just getting everything up and running and also where i see the steam deck headed next when it comes to emulation now a couple things to talk about before we get started number one i did not install windows on the machine even though it would have been pretty easy to set up windows and then run a bunch of emulators because this isn't my steam deck i didn't feel comfortable wiping the operating system and putting a new one on there and so we're just gonna stick with the capabilities of the stock operating system which is steam os and secondly because i only had a couple days doing retro emulation with this device i didn't have a chance to set up a nice and fancy front end so we're just gonna stick with the meat and potatoes of emulation and the performance in this video when i do get my own steam deck which should be hopefully soon i'm in the second quarter of sales then i will absolutely get a lot more in depth when it comes to the front end experience and how to actually transform this device into a retro gaming powerhouse but i think you might be pleasantly surprised at the performance that we are gonna get just in a couple days of tinkering when the steam deck was first announced last year i made a video about the emulation possibilities of this particular chipset and i'm happy to say that i was not disappointed when i got it in my hands okay and one last note here there's not going to be any nintendo intellectual property in this video as you may have heard they've been on a warpath in getting youtube to take down videos that show nintendo emulation on a steam deck and so because that you're not going to see any mario or things like that in this video but i might have a special emulation related video coming out tomorrow and so if you're not already subscribed now's your chance anyway without any further delay let's jump into this okay if you've seen other steam deck videos you've probably seen a lot about the steamos game interface but this is the steamos desktop interface and you can swap between the two of them interchangeably now the desktop version has an app called discover within here is an application repository so what you want to do is go into applications then games and then emulators and then it's as simple as just pressing the install button and it'll install it right on your device and there are a bunch of standalone emulators within here as well as retroarch and these are all linux based versions of emulators you're probably already familiar with anyway these are the ones that i chose to install on the device on the far left i have retroarch now that one is going to cover all the classic systems basically everything up to psp will run flawlessly on this device through retroarch and so then anything that's higher end than that it's going to need its own standalone emulator now to get these to show up on the gaming side of the steamos platform you actually have to add them to steam here in the desktop so you just open up the steam app and as you can see it's the desktop client and then down here on the bottom left there's an add a game button what you want to do here is select add a non-steam game now everything that you installed via that discover application is going to probably show up here and so what you want to do here is just check all of these and then choose add selected programs you can also browse for the file if it doesn't show up here now when you go into the gaming site of steamos you will find those apps there now let's talk about rom management you're probably going to want to put everything on an sd card but you could use your internal storage too personally i put everything on a one terabyte sd card which has already been installed and to do that all you have to do is just take the sd card put it inside and then through the menu format that card the card will actually be formatted in an ext4 file system which is necessary for the gaming side of steam os and so in order to move the roms i actually just did it directly on the device i took an external hard drive that already had all my roms on it plugged it into the usb port at the top of the steam deck and then copied all the files from the hard drive over onto the sd card it was kind of slow i would say it probably took me four hours altogether especially because those higher end systems have larger file sizes but i was able to load this thing up with a ton of different games that i can play on various systems now a terabyte for an sd card is kind of overkill but it also gives me the option to install steam games on all the unused space as well but you could also use smaller cards like one that's specifically for roms and then another card for steam games too so that'll be all up to you either way that's how i have it set up now this is going to work for all of the emulators except one and that is the cemu emulator that one doesn't have a linux version but luckily we can use the proton compatibility layer to allow us to actually use it inside the discover store there's going to be an app called proton up qt and as you can see it's listed as a utility so the first thing you have to do is install that next using firefox you're going to want to browse to the cmu website and then download the windows version of that app and as you see here i've moved it all over into one folder it even has an exe file because it's a straight up windows program and then same thing here i added the cmu app directly into the steam desktop client basically adding it as a non-steam game but yeah in a nutshell that's how you're going to set everything up the cemu 1 is just a little bit special everything else is relatively seamless so let's tap the return to gaming mode option here and as you can see we're back in the system this is the home screen here but this is what the library looks like and this is where you're probably going to spend most of your time now all those emulators that we installed are going to show up under the non-steam category on the far right and as you can see within here all of those apps that we added to steam on the desktop side now appear now we have one more thing to do with the cemu app because this is a windows app we're going to go into it and then hit the cog and then go into properties and then compatibility within here we're going to select force the use of a specific compatibility tool and then you'll see a bunch of different proton layers what you want to select is the ge proton 7 through 9. that's the one we installed earlier in this video and that's it when you open up the cemu app from now on just like magic it's going to run a windows app within linux now as you can see i did not pretty up these apps in any way i just kind of left them there that's mostly because i ran out of time but other people have recommended the steam rom manager this is a tool that will let you embed your emulators directly into the steam experience and you can also add individual games too and there's already a whole guide on this specific to the steam deck and i'll leave it linked in my written article which will be in the video description but yeah if you have a steam deck and you want to get into emulation i would really recommend the steam rom manager because this seems to be the best tool right now and this is what it'll look like on steam os once you have it set up you can basically browse your individual games however you'd like now last year when it was first announced and i made my video i talked about the possibility of using bottasera operating system with the steam deck and so this week i did spend some time trying to get bottasera up and running i was able to get this screen rotated and then scaled correctly and then i could also navigate the menus using a usb controller unfortunately every time i tried to boot up a game it would crash but i've sent my findings over to the developers of badassera unfortunately they don't have a steam deck either at this point but i think the fact that this can boot bodicera at all is a really good sign and so i'm not making any promises here but i do think that the possibility of badasera running on this device is going to be very high and that's a really great thing because you can load the complete bodicera operating system on an sd card or a usb flash drive and it will pre-configure all of your emulators for you all you have to do is just add your own games and it has a lovely interface that can be customized with several different themes it's just a joy to use and so my hope is that once i have my own steam deck in my hands i'll be able to make an sd card that's dedicated to badasera and i'm going to load that one up with all my retro games and then i'll be able to swap out my sd cards as i like depending on whether or not i want to play retro games in badassera or i want to jump right back into steam os and start playing some pc games either way i think this is going to be really promising and it's basically a dual boot solution and i showed off this proof of concept last year when i made a badassera flash drive that i can then plug into random pcs and run badasser from there and sure enough i was actually able to use this usb flash drive to boot bottosera on the steam deck you know with the amount of popularity of the steam deck i would fully expect that bottasera won't be the only operating system like this available in the future we might potentially see something like emiolette come on here as well but i would say in terms of the high-end systems bottasera is further along than any of the other distros and so this is probably the one to keep your eye on if you are interested in this in the future anyway that's about all i can show you about badassera unfortunately i wasn't able to actually test the gameplay on it but it was pretty cool that the user interface was at least working now one last note before we get into the gameplay aspect there is a version of retroarch available within steam and it's completely free to download and you might be tempted to try this one out well i found in my testing that this was not a very ideal solution the amount of cores available on this version is pretty limited and you have to install each of them as dlc and it gets kind of cumbersome so i'd recommend just getting the linux version directly from the desktop client like i showed you earlier in this video that's the one i used in all of my testing and so this is what it looks like after i spent a couple days configuring it and setting up playlists and things like that i can basically browse through each of my systems then pick a game and launch it from there and within each of these systems i've configured it the way i like now i'm not going to get into detail about all that because we'd be here for hours but i did make a retro mark starter guide a couple weeks ago and also leave that linked in my written article which will be in the video description so if you want to set up retroarch on the device this is where you want to go to learn everything and so with that out of the way let's get into the actual gameplay now we're going to start with the low end systems and work our way up now with game boy no huge surprises here this obviously was going to be able to run on the steam deck but i will say the 16 by 10 display on the steam deck does give you a pretty big size when it comes to the squarish aspect ratio of the original game boy you get a pretty good amount of screen real estate it's actually about five and a half inches altogether out of the seven inches available on the steam deck i've also added this nice game boy shader which is available in the options and not only does it have some nice colorization to it but it has a pretty neat grid as well this is one of the more intensive shaders available in retro arc but as you can see here the steam deck is eating it up no problem and same thing with game boy color it's the same aspect ratio and screen dimensions and it does look pretty good i am using an lcd grid overlay and then some color correction as well now moving up to game boy advance this device was originally a 3x2 aspect ratio so it's slightly a wider screen and it turns out it's very similar to the 16 by 10 screen found on the steam deck there are just tiny little black borders on each side all told you're going to get something like six and three quarters of a screen dimension here and so of all the systems that i tested this is probably one of the best matches for the steam decks display and on this one i'm also using an lcd grid shader and so yeah the steam deck is totally overkill when it comes to game boy advance but as you can see here it looks wonderful on this display sticking with the handheld theme this is the ds here now i'm running this at a 3x resolution and i've made the top screen larger than the bottom screen that's why they're of different sizes here and i've also set it up that i can just swap between the two by pressing the r2 button now the thing is nintendo ds emulation is not very good on retroarch but because the steam deck is so powerful it actually is just fine even when displaying it at a 3x resolution which many many pcs are not capable of doing so yeah i think you're going to be able to play any ds game at a 3x resolution on the steam deck and on top of that because the steam deck has a touch screen interface you'll be able to tap on the screen like you did on the original ds and i'll be sure to show off 3ds gameplay in that next video that will be coming out tomorrow ok now let's jump into 4x3 aspect ratio consoles like the original nes as you can see here you get about 6 inches of screen real estate with the 7 inch display and so even though there are black bezels on the sides of the games here they're actually really not that bad at all especially compared to something like a 16x9 display or the typical 21x9 displays that you find with a smartphone and so not a lot more to talk about when it comes to nes other than the fact that these games are all going to run flawlessly and the 4x3 aspect ratio does present itself to be pretty nice on this display okay moving up to snes i do want to talk a little bit about scaling with this display because it's only a 1280x800 display that means if you don't use integer scaling you're going to have pixel distortion as you can see with the lifebar and mega man x it's a little bit distorted some of the little life tabs are bigger than the others and it's not supposed to be that way and that's a good indication that you're having problems with pixel distortion so let me show you how to fix that within the retroarch settings what you want to do is open up a game go into settings then video and then turn bi-linear filtering on now that typically is going to soften the image and not make it look very sharp but because this thing is so powerful we can use some video filters instead we're going to use one here called normal 4x what this is going to do is it's going to blow up the size of the image to four times the resolution and then shrink it back down and when it does that it preserves the sharpness of the image and so as you can see here the life bar has been fixed and like with the nes we're getting about 6 inches of screen real estate as well and so yeah that's the trick to get sharp and clear pixel games when it comes to the steam decks display of course you don't have to use the normal 4x filter you could use like a crt filter or anything else like that but if you want a very accurate signal that's how you would do it and of course the games play just lovely on the snes i'm using the bsnes core which is a more accurate core but does require some more system resources but of course the steam deck can handle all of that no problem okay moving over to sega genesis here same story you're going to want to do that same bilinear filter and normal 4x filter and much like with the snes this one is just perfect too and same goes with the sega cd and the 32x both they're going to use these same tricks to make a sharp image and they're gonna be a joy to play too okay let's talk about arcade now of course you're gonna be able to play your classic main games like dig dug no problem in fact basically any arcade game that's available in maim should play pretty well on this device i did decide to use a crt shader on the display itself just to give it a little bit more of an arcade feel with that crt like rounded display now i didn't get a chance to put a really heavy rom set on here mostly because i don't use the main current core with a lot of my own emulation and so i just didn't have the games to test but if you are interested in playing classic games absolutely no problem everything up through the 90s and of course once you get into the higher end arcade systems it's a lot more complex but i do think the steam deck is more than capable of playing all that stuff too either way arcade's going to be a lot of fun on the steam deck and let me show you what that shader looks like when i actually use the video out as you can see it's very subtle but i really like this look okay and while i was here i did load up my neo geo roms and these play just fine too no surprises here at all and so let's move on to some of the higher end systems we'll start with playstation 1 so i used the duck station core within retroarch and i upscaled the resolution to 4x and then i turned on geometry correction which prevents wobbly pixels and of course this played all these games at the higher resolution with no problem and it typically would keep the power consumption to under 10 watts which means that you should expect to get between four and five hours of gameplay if you were to play playstation upscale like this one of the other nice things about using retroarch like i am for some of these systems is that i can use universal hotkeys and one of my favorites is the fast forward function for example if i press it here with final fantasy 9 the frames per second will jump up to something like 450 or 500 frames per second and so if you want to go back and play one of your favorite role-playing games from the playstation era but you don't want to sit through all the dialogue at that like mid-90s speed this is the way that you can basically breeze through all that stuff when you want and so to set up hotkeys that's all going to be in the retroarch starter guide that i mentioned earlier in this video either way playstation 1 no problem even when upscaling it to 4x in fact you could probably upscale it to something like 10x if you wanted the reason why i used 4x is because that's the highest the screen will be able to show and so that's what i tried to do with each of these emulators so i didn't use up the battery more than i needed to now moving over to sega saturn i decided to use the beetle saturn core instead of the typical one i use which is the yabasan shiro core and that's because i was getting some visual artifacts with the yabasan chirokore and the beetle one just looked a lot nicer now as far as i could tell the beetle one does not have the ability to upscale 3d graphics and so because of that i kept everything at the native saturn resolution and i mentioned this all the time in my other videos but i actually prefer the native resolution when playing sega saturn i was never able to get my hands on this system when i was a kid and so seeing it like this just kind of brings all those memories back but in a good way okay moving on we're going to try n64 now and i've upscaled it to 1280 by 960. and as you can see here the steam deck is having no problems with this at all in fact it's giving about 7 watts altogether of power usage what that means is you can expect to get somewhere between six and seven hours of gameplay when playing something like n64 okay moving up to sega dreamcast i'm using the flycast core within retroarch here 1280x960 just like with the nintendo 64. in some cases i turned on the widescreen hack to have a little bit more of a display but either way much like with n64 this hovered around seven or below watts altogether which again means you're going to get a lot of battery life if you're going to be playing these systems [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay moving on to psp at this point we're going to use 4x resolution which is a little bit lower than 1080p and i'm going to start with god of war chains of olympus because this game is one of the hardest to emulate and so if this one can run at 4x that means everything else is going to be able to as well and as expected every other psp game plays at 4x resolution with no problem this is at the point of just set and forget like you just put the 4x resolution on and then just start playing games and don't worry about the settings at all this is always my favorite place to be when it comes to game emulation and because the psp ran at an aspect ratio that was very close to 16x9 playing it on the 16x10 display of the steam deck is actually really really nice you do get some black bars at the top and bottom but they're hardly noticeable everything looks really sharp here you know in my io next review i did mention that that was the best system i'd ever played psp on before well it turns out i was just a big fat liar because the ergonomics of the steam deck actually make this preferable over the ineo next and so ladies and gentlemen i'm happy to announce that this is the best device i've ever played psp on okay for the next systems we're gonna play around a little bit with video out now if you saw some of my social media i had a heck of a time actually getting this to work in the first place but here is the setup that i ended up using to make it work i'm using an anker 71 usbc hub and then i'm using the 45 watt steam deck plug that comes with the device now initially i was using my 65 watt plug which is from anker and something about that voltage was not playing well when it came to video out and so if you're going to have a setup like this i highly recommend just use the regular steam deck one anyway i also have an hdmi cable here nothing fancy and then a usb mouse and keyboard to allow me to navigate through some of the menus and i'm not using a special hdmi cable it's actually just one for my nintendo switch now here's something interesting in the game mode of steam os when i plug this into my 4k monitor it defaulted to a 4k resolution and there's no option in steemos to turn it down and when i started trying to navigate the menus or load up an emulator it actually got bogged down now there's a million reasons why this could have been happening and i didn't have the chance to actually really troubleshoot that but either way i think this is something either the community is going to help figure out or hopefully valve can improve its steam os to allow you to turn down the resolution when in game mode when in desktop mode there are display settings and i was able to turn it to the 1280x800 resolution of the original steam deck screen and so that's what i'm going to use when i do my video capture footage like here so all that being said let's get into the standalone emulators next we'll start with pcsx2 which is the playstation 2 emulator now this one i ran at a 2x resolution so a 960p signal which is going to be hitting the limits of the steam deck screen and so if you're going to be playing in handheld mode there is no incentive to move it beyond 2x resolution and for the most part with the games that i expected to do well with playstation 2 they ran fine for the most part i just kept it in the default settings i didn't mess with hacks or anything else like that but they're all available if you have specific things you want to set up for individual games either way i would say that most of the ps2 catalog is going to be perfectly playable at a 2x resolution here on the steam deck and even some of the harder to run games things like god of war 1 they played just fine 2x resolution with no stutters or anything but unfortunately god of war 2 at a 2x resolution does not play at full speed on average you're getting about 50 to 55 frames per second and it's pulling a tdp of about 16 or 17 watts that means it's gonna drain your battery in about three hours altogether so this is not going to be great for ps2 marathon sessions if you're going to play some of those harder systems and some of the games are going to be glitchy no matter what you do jack and daxter is a great example i wasn't able to turn on enough hacks to actually make it look very nice instead i had to use software rendering and the steam deck is actually powerful enough to run software rendering for games like this but unfortunately they're not going to upscale and they just kind of have a pixelated look to them now i think a good example when it comes to performance is going to be champions of norwrath on the ps2 this game for the most part can play at 2x resolution and you're going to get around 60 frames per second in a lot of areas when you move into a part that's a little bit larger that has more things it needs to render you are going to get some frame dips and they're not massive but they are noticeable and so this is one of those games that kind of has a bit of a yo-yo effect when it comes to the frame rate and so as an experiment i decided to turn it down to a 1x or a native resolution instead of the 2x one and i learned two things number one is it makes it a lot fuzzier even with the seven-inch display on the steam deck a 1x resolution of ps2 just doesn't look all that great it's only a 480p signal and the lack of resolution is very noticeable and it turns out the slowdown on 1x resolution is almost identical to what it is with the 2x resolution so here i'm playing the 1x and the 2x resolution footage at the same time and yes both of them dip and the 1x resolution does dip slightly less than the 2x resolution but honestly it's not a big difference personally i'd rather have a 2x resolution all the time so that everything looks nice and pretty and deal with a little bit more slowdown here and there but of course that's going to be all up to you okay moving over to the dolphin emulator here we're also going to use a 2x resolution and as you can see here a 2x resolution of dolphin with this particular system is just fine i'm getting a solid 60 frames per second and no complaints here now with each of these standalone emulators it can be a little bit of a pain because you have to go in and configure each of your button maps and you know with standalone emulators like this each of these systems will have their own way of actually setting up the controls so there's no like universal way of doing it this is one of the reasons why i prefer using retroarch for as many cores as i can either way when it comes to performance the dolphin emulator does really well even with the second system that the dolphin emulator can run i was still using a 2x resolution and in general i was getting some pretty good performance now in tomorrow's video i will show off some games that did have some performance struggles which is pretty surprising to me considering how powerful the steam deck is and so i think that's more of a matter of optimization and configuration than it is the actual brute force power of the steam deck itself and so i think as more emulation developers get their hands on this console we're gonna see improved gameplay i'm hoping that a year from now this won't even be part of the conversation okay moving on to the cemu emulator this is running at a native resolution here i'm going to use some cross-platform titles here just to keep me out of hot water but as you can see it's running pretty well now the games that i'm testing in this video they're a little bit lightweight and i'll show some heavier hitting ones in tomorrow's video but either way i'm just fascinated by the fact that the cemu emulator works so well considering the fact that this is actually a windows app it's really a testament to how well that proton layer works when it comes to compatibility with linux and windows and next let's talk a little bit about the yuzu emulator again i'm going to show some cross platform titles now this one i also kept it a native resolution and the performance results on this were a mixed bag as well for the most part i would say about half the games would play the ones you would expect to play well like the 2d games and things like that those are all just fine but some of the more intensive 3d based ones you are gonna have a problem it's kind of amazing that we can even have this conversation with a handheld pc whose starting price starts at four hundred dollars okay moving on here is the xemio emulator running the original xbox now unfortunately a lot of the games on this emulator do struggle to perform well but you know i wouldn't really consider that the fault of the steam deck the xbox is a pretty hard system to emulate and the zmu emulator needs a lot more optimizations too and so it may be in the future this app does get updated to run a little bit better but to be honest at this point there's not a lot of games on the original xbox that haven't already been ported to some other system and that's kind of the trend as we start to move up here the harder the system is to emulator the less interest i end up having it because for the most part many of these games are available on other platforms and on top of that the original game files for each of these systems tend to get bigger and bigger too and so you end up having to spend more money on storage as well and so yeah the original xbox doesn't play super well on the steam deck but it's not really something that i'm going to be losing sleep over and finally let's talk about playstation 3. now i don't have a ton of playstation 3 games that are dumped that i can actually play but i do have a few and i'm going to show off those here when it comes to playstation network games you know the ones that you can just download and play those for the most part are going to play full speed no problem but this kind of goes back to that whole conversation we were having with the xbox in some of these cases the juice just isn't worth the squeeze for example check out the tdp on this emulator as it tries to play ducktales it's running a tdp of around 22 watts that means you're gonna get something like two maybe two and a half hours of gameplay altogether and that's pretty inefficient if you look at the steam version of the exact same game it's running at 11 watts and it's gonna give you something around four hours of gameplay instead and so this is just an example here that if there is a port available and you can play it on steam then i would just recommend waiting for a sail and grabbing it rather than trying to emulate and this is the same story for some of the larger ps3 games as well let's look at the 2008 version of prince of persia now this game can run up to 60 frames per second but often in emulation i was getting under 30 frames per second in certain scenes and that would result in slow down and audio stuttering all those things that are kind of typical of emulation but again running the steam version of this game it was running at 60 frames per second no problem on top of that the tdp was about 10 watts lower than the emulator and so instead of getting about two two and a half hours of gameplay i would expect to get between three and three and a half instead so yes i would say that if there is a certain playstation 3 exclusive game that you really want to play then it might be worth your time to try to figure out how to get it to emulate on the steam deck but bear in mind the ps3 file sizes are just massive so you're gonna have to get like a super big sd card or you have to plug it in via usb drive things like that and after you've done all that i'm sorry to say but the performance might not actually be worth it for example here's infamous a ps3 exclusive game running at the native resolution no upscaling or anything and i'm getting about 18 maybe 20 frames per second to me this game is completely unplayable and so i would say that the ps3 is actually the performance limit of the steam deck you're going to be able to play all the way up through the cemu emulator with relatively little problems but when you try to run original xbox and ps3 those two systems do have a hard time keeping up alright everyone that's it for this video i know it was a pretty long one but i hope it was helpful for you the way i see it if the steam deck was exclusively made for emulation meaning that it couldn't even play pc games at all i still think that this thing is almost worth that 400 sticker price because nowhere else can you play up to gen 6 and even some gen 7 consoles on a dedicated handheld under 500 and so the fact that this thing can also play just about every other pc game under the sun makes this thing head over heels amazing i've only spent about 48 hours digging into emulation on this device and i'm more than happy with the results and i hope you've enjoyed them too so let me know what you think in the comments below and be sure to check out tomorrow's video where i show off some more footage for some of the other games as always thanks for watching be sure to like and subscribe and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 517,916

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Id: UzwHHV9T6rk

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022