Steam Deck: How to run Windows exe games/applications in SteamOS

so you got yourself a steam deck and a windows exe executable file and you want to see if you can get it to run on the out-of-box steam os using linux i'm here to help you do that first thing you're going to do is hold down the power button top right of your deck until it pops this screen up and switch to desktop this will take us over to the linux desktop which will allow us to add games to our steam library which we can then utilize valve's proton to translate essentially a windows exe over to a linux executable it's not always going to work for you you're going to have hiccups you can have bugs i'll even show you what that might look like but get yourself an exe you can do it through obviously downloading something to the web browser here you can stick in a flash drive with an exe on it and drag it over whatever you want to do i went ahead and downloaded maim so i'm going to be showing you the windows x64 version of maim and we're going to see if we can get it to work here on deck so first thing you're gonna do it once you've got your exe on your system is you're gonna hover over steam in the bottom right here and you are gonna go to library from library here at the top hit games and hit add a non-steam game to my library hit browse if you've downloaded it through the deck here through the os you're going to want to go all the way back and go to home and then deck and then downloads and then mine is right in here once you're in the actual folder uh you'll probably want to drop this down and hit all files it's looking for a desktop file but again it'll be a dot exe in most cases so maymarcade.exe i'm going to hit open you'll see it should automatically put a check mark next to it there you just hit add selected programs and now if we scroll down here on the left side it should show up in our lists which is awesome the next thing you're going to want to do is click on it click a little gear here on the right and hit properties from here click the compatibility option you do want to usually click force the use of a specific steam play compatibility tool and then pick proton experimental you have a bunch of options here i found proton experimental to be the best now if it doesn't work you can try other things there will likely be a lot of cases where these exes just don't work at all it's totally just going to depend on a lot of factors but i'm going to go ahead and use proton experimental for this and from there i'm just going to hit play and see if maim works on steam deck again it's the x64 windows executable of maim running on steam os and you'll see it booted up just fine if you're familiar with main this is what it looks like controls do work right so if i come to my game here and hit a i'll show you real quick that the game itself will boot up so this is uh dodonpachi said iojo and i just wanted to test to see if i get it to work and it works great um i have no issues it is a 10 year old game but it's running via emulation here on maim but again you know on the out of the box linux os via proton which is just amazing stuff people with valve are absolute wizards um but you'll see come in here i'll insert a coin here i've mapped my buttons already [Music] right and it works great [Music] let's just give you an idea there again there's my windows executable maim running uh and obviously in this case i'm running inside iojo but could run anything else on main through this so i'm gonna go ahead and quit and i'll just show you so this is all you really need to know stop the video now go ahead go enjoy your stuff um but some things you may run into that i ran into is for meme in particular i'm gonna go ahead and log out which will hopefully flip me back over to the um just the main steamos ui here rather than the desktop uh one thing i noticed with maim in particular is that it actually won't run from this other view and i'll just show you what that looks like real quick uh so for maim for what i'm using here i will have to just boot over to that desktop to run it you'll see it shows up here and i can hit play and it even gets to the screen where i can select my rom here but as soon as i pick one there's a little command prompt that pops up it thinks for a second and it kicks me back out so again no big deal because in this case i can flip over to the desktop view and it works just fine there but you may run into that again you can also flip through those different proton compatibility modes and see if any of those will work for your exe as well this should work you know you can try any windows executable file it doesn't need to be a game you know i don't know go wild microsoft office whatever the heck you want to see if you can get running on the out of box steam os go ahead and give it a shot hope this video was helpful to you thank you for watching

Channel: Hardcore Tanoshii

Views: 144,722

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Id: Z0DymLDgTwQ

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022