The New EmuDeck is Here! Steam Deck Emulation Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Metro game core today we're going to do an updated guide on emu deck this is an emulation tool available for the steam deck and essentially this is a really clever tool that will install all of the necessary emulators for your device but then also pre-configure everything for you as well from there all you have to do is just add your ROM files and then everything will be integrated nicely now one of my favorite things about Emmy deck is the freedom to choose how you're actually going to play those games for example you can throw all of your games into something called emulation station this is going to allow you to access and navigate through all of your games in just one single app or if you have some special favorites that you would like to integrate with the rest of the Steam OS interface this will allow you to do that too and of course in this video I'm going to show you how to set both of these up in no time flat anyway we've got a lot of ground to cover here today we're going to talk about the new features available in emeda 2.1 and then also how to upgrade from a previous version of if you've already installed it and then finally if you're brand new and don't know anything about this stuff I'm going to show you how to get going as well and so without any further delay let's go ahead and jump in [Music] okay let's quickly go over some of the new updates to me deck version 2.1 first we've got a new user interface and this is a lot easier to navigate along those same lines we now have a new menu which will allow you to manage your emulators here on the Fly and I'm also going to demonstrate all these as we go through the video they've also added a few new Standalone emulators as you can see right here and probably the biggest quality of life update for me is the fact that they've updated the steam ROM manager if you tried this one before you probably saw that it was a clunky interface on the steam deck now we have a new emu Deck theme which makes it a lot easier to work with and thanks to the updates in Steam ROM manager we now have the ability to have automatic steam input profiles which is great because now you don't have to configure some of those special systems like Wii U and 3DS the new version of emu deck also supports the newest version of emulation station which includes some new themes and the ability to download themes directly onto the device when it comes to managing your files we have a couple new tweaks here as well there's a new USB transfer wizard which will allow you to basically import your games directly from a USB flash drive and if you want to move your entire me deck installation over from an SD card to a hard drive or vice versa you can do that now too and we have some additional apps available under what they're calling the cloud services manager here you can make automated apps for things like Netflix and Disney plus and it can also install game streaming services like Moonlight and then finally they have what they're calling the MU Deck Store this is a collection of Homebrew and freeware games so if you want to just download these safely and legally you can totally do that too now if you're new to Emmy deck there are three resources I want to introduce you to here from the get-go number one is going to be mudec.com in addition to showing you some of the features this is where you'll go to download the initial Emmy deck file it also has links to things like their Twitter and Discord if you want to get in touch that way too additionally we have a very comprehensive mu deck Wiki page too here you're going to find frequently asked questions as well as configurations for every single emulated system that you can think of so if you run into an issue chances are that the Wiki page will have what you need and then finally on my website retrogamecor.com I have my own steam deck guide too I'm gonna go pretty fast through this video just to make sure I cover everything but if you'd rather take it at a slower Pace then I would recommend checking out the written version right here and I'll have all of this stuff Linked In the video guide below now if you've previously installed Emmy deck and you just want to update to the newest version it's actually a very simple process all you have to do is just open up your current installation of emu deck and it will immediately check for updates and then install the installation here and once it's done it may not look like it's updated you'll probably just get to this screen right here all you have to do is just go through that configuration again which we'll do here in this video now if you're just brand new to getting started with emulation on the steam deck you probably have three major questions and so let's address these each one at a time to start the first question is going to be where do I find these games or as we call them in the emulation World ROMs well the short answer for that is that ROMs are copyrighted files and so you're not going to find any links for them in any of my resources here and you're going to be on your own to find them and it's one of the great Mysteries of the world unfortunately there just really isn't any good resources out there and so if you're trying to get started with your own ROM collection unfortunately it's just a really big mystery now the second question you're probably asking is okay now that I have these games from that mysterious place where do I store them on the steam deck and the simple answer here is if you have the storage for it internally you can just save them right there on your steam deck however if you want to expand your storage with a Micro SD card you can also save them there and if you already have a micro SD card installed into your steam deck you can still use that one as well you can have both these emulated files and your steam library on the same card and the size of the card is really going to be up to you and your budget but if you're looking for a cheap storage solution just for emulated games I would say at least 128 gigs is going to be your best bet and I'll have links to some of my favorite SD cards to use with the steam deck in the video description as well okay now that you have your games and you have a place to put them you're probably going to be wondering how do you actually get them onto the steam deck and this is kind of tricky because when you format an SD card to work with a steam deck it's not going to be easily readable by either Windows or Mac and so the easiest thing to do here is to create a workaround personally I have a USBC solid state drive like this one here and it's loaded up with all my emulated ROMs and an external drive like this is going to be readable both on Mac and windows as well as on the steam deck so what I can do here is use my computer to put all these files onto the hard drive and then plug this drive directly into the steam deck and then transfer the games onto it there and you don't need a fancy drive like this one in fact if you just have a USB flash drive like this this will totally work as well just bear in mind that the steam deck only has a USBC input Port so if you have a USB a drive like this you will likely need to use either a USBC adapter like this one or you're going to need something like a USB hub or one of those docks that they make for the steam deck as well either way those are the main questions I always get and so I hope that provided some clarification so let's go ahead and Dive Right In as if you were just now getting started with mu deck for the first time first thing you want to do is put that micro SD card into the steam deck and then we need to format it to work with Steam OS and to do this press the steam button to bring up the menu on the left then go into settings and system from there scroll down to the format SD card section and then select it and as a reminder if you've already formatted your card to work with Steam OS before you don't have to do it again right here this is only if you have a brand new card anyway once the card is formatted we need to switch over to the steam deck desktop mode we're going to press that steam button again and then go down to power and then select switch to desktop once you're here you need to open up a web browser like Firefox and then go to mudek.com from there you can tap on the download button right here and then click on this button that says download the Emmy deck installer this will give you a quick warning to say that you need to put it on your desktop and once it's done downloading you can click on this icon to go to the downloads folder and there you should see the Emu deck desktop download file from here drag it over to your desktop and then select move here after that you can go to your desktop and then you'll find that same app go ahead and double click on the app and then it's going to ask do you really want to do this from here just click on the button that says yeah man I want to do it after that you'll get a script that's going to pop up right here as it downloads the actual deck file once that's done it's going to boot directly into mudek and take you to this front page and this here is our main installation page and you have two options easy mode or custom mode easy Mode's just going to do everything for you but we're actually going to go through the custom mode so I can show you all the different configuration options you have when installing emu deck so let's go ahead and select custom mode and then continue first thing it's going to ask where do you want to have your ROM stored you can choose either between your SD card or the default internal storage or if you'd like you can set up your own custom folder as well for this installation we're going to keep things basic so we're just going to do the SD card next it'll give you the option of choosing between the Steam deck or other devices and obviously we're going to use the steam deck here from there it's going to give you an option of different emulators that you can have installed by default most of these will be turned on but a couple will be grayed out and if you want to unselect any of these just go ahead and click on them for example I don't plan on using the Standalone DS emulator and same thing with like scum VM and PS Vita once you're satisfied with the emulators you want to install go ahead and press continue and it's going to ask you some similar questions about pre-configurations for each of those emulators personally I recommend using the default configurations because this has been fine-tuned by the emulation community on the next page it's going to ask you whether or not you want to have autosave enabled what this means is that for these retro systems it'll save the game when you close it and then boot it right back into that same part when you start it back up and this is using something called save states and I really appreciate this feature and so I'm going to turn it on on the next page it'll give you a choice of a login if you have an account with retroachievements.org and this is totally free to set up and it basically will give you trophies for some of your old school games and this is a really nice way of breathing new life into some of those older games on the next page it's going to ask you whether or not you want to have bezels pre-configured on your retro game systems and this is nice because it covers up the black bars on some of those retro games that had a less wide aspect ratio speaking of which the next couple Pages here will allow you to set the aspect ratio for some of these classic systems for this installation here I'm just going to keep everything at the original 4x3 for most of these but if you want to do something like widescreen hacks and try to get a more elevated experience you can totally do that too and then finally the last tweaking you can do for your retro games is to choose whether or not to have special shaders applied to your image as well these will give some of your games a more old school Vibe but personally I like to just kind of keep it plain and simple and finally it's going to give you an option of three different default themes for emulation station this is the app I was telling you about earlier where you can kind of navigate through all your games at once I'm also going to show you how to change out your theme so it really doesn't matter what you choose right here but personally I like the one that's called modern anyway once you're done with all that you'll get to the summary page right here it's going to show you all the configurations you're going to do here with Emmy deck and if you're happy with what you see go ahead and press the Finish button and it'll start the installation now for this part I would kick back maybe go grab a drink this is going to take about five minutes all together and that's because it's going to be downloading all the various emulators and then installing all the configurations for them all at once and really this is where the magic of mu deck is happening usually this would take you like a week or two to actually set this all up but here with this tool you can get it done in a matter of five minutes once you're done it'll confirm that everything has been installed successfully and now you can select add games now the next screen is a new feature with version 2.1 essentially what you can do here is grab a USB drive and then plug it in directly into your steam deck from there you can click on the USB drive icon and then identify what you've plugged in next me deck is going to save a folder onto that drive and within that folder it's going to be all the other subfolders that will contain your ROMs from there you can pull that drive out of the steam deck and then plug it into your computer then you can take all of your ROM files and put them into those folders that mudat created after you've moved your games over you're going to replug that USB drive back into your steam deck and then you'll have the option to import all those games directly into your mudek folder so essentially this allows you to move all of your ROMs onto the correct file system but in the comfort of your Mac or Windows PC and honestly that's a little bit less clunky than trying to do it in desktop mode on the steam deck either way that's how this feature will work and so if you are interested in trying it out this is where you would do it personally we're going to do it manually here later in this video but I wanted to show you this new feature because it is pretty cool regardless of whether or not you use this tool you can press the skip for now button right here and this is going to take you to the new main me deck interface from now on anytime you open up Emmy deck this is the screen you're going to see and we got a lot of options right here and I'll walk you through most of these here in a minute but for now I want to focus on the next step that you'll want to do when setting up Emmy deck which is to load up all your games and like I mentioned we're going to do this manually so if we go into our file manager here on the desktop if we go and select our SD card which will be here down the bottom under removable drives you can see we have four folders all together the one we want to go into is the one called emulation and from there we have two major folders we're going to focus on one called ROMs and one called bios inside the ROMs folder you're going to find all these different subfolders that correspond to different emulated systems and some of these are shortened and so they're kind of hard to read but if you scroll down to the bottom there's going to be a text file called systems and within here it'll give you a breakdown of what each folder means for each system so this is is a great way to orient yourself to these folders because it can be a little bit intimidating next we're going to take that USB drive I showed earlier and plug it into the steam deck and so that's the window we're seeing here on the right these are all my game files which are hosted on that drive now all I need to do is just copy over some of these games into the Emu deck folder here on the steam deck which again is the window here on the left and this is a fairly simple process it's mostly just drag and drop so if I go into my own 3DS folder you can see all my 3DS games and then also here on the left I can go into my mudek 3DS folder each of these folders will also have a text file and if you open that up it's going to show you the name of the system as well as the supported file types and so if you're not sure if your ROM file is the correct file format this is where you could check it anyway from there all you have to do is just start dragging and dropping your games you can do these all at once or one at a time it's really up to you and really I'm just going to do a few here and there just for demonstration purposes and when you drag it over it's going to ask do you want to move or copy I would select copy that way you won't remove the original file from your usb drive and really when it comes to your game files that's going to be in a nutshell of course you want to make sure that you have the right ROM files for each system but it really is just a matter of drag and drop now that you've moved over your game files let's talk a little bit about bios files and these are system files that are required for certain emulators to work properly again these files are also copyrighted so I'm not going to share them and I can't tell you where to get them but once you move them over this is what the BIOS files for the major systems are going to look like right here and I realize I'm kind of glossing over this point and it is a little bit confusing but there are a bunch of resources out there to help you out for example on the Emmy deck Wiki there is something called a cheat sheet this will show you every system the folder the games go into and then also the files that are supported and any required bios files and so if you do get stuck at any point I would recommend going to the Emmy deck Wiki page and reading through your options here additionally I've summarized some of this here on my own guide as well if you select the add games and bios files section right here you can see here a list of all the names of the BIOS files that I use for the most common systems in the end this is probably one of the more intimidating parts of this entire guide but trust me you got this so now that we've moved over all of our games and bios files let's open up mudek again and like I mentioned it's going to take you back to this main screen right here so let's do a quick orientation of some of your options under the Quick Settings menu you can basically go through and reconfigure all those settings that we set up earlier so if you want to change your aspect ratio or turn off a Shader this is where you would do it here the next section is called manage emulators and I'm sure you can guess what you can do here probably the most helpful thing is pressing this update button right here I would do this maybe every other week or so and this will make sure you have the most updated version of each of the emulators available but if you'd like you can also go and manage them each individually so within here you can reset the configuration in case you host them up yourself and you can also update or uninstall an emulator from here additionally it's going to show you any sort of special configuration settings and then also your hotkeys while you're playing a game finally the last button on the top row is going to be the mudex store this is the one I was telling you about before where you can download freeware or Homebrew games in all these games are freely available and some of them are really great next we're going to move on to the next section called tools and stuff the most important one among them is this one here called steam raw manager and we'll get to that one here in a minute but first I want to show you the others now if by chance you want to totally reset your entire Emmy deck installation you can do that right here with the quick reset and custom reset options and this will essentially go back and do the exact same thing we did earlier with the easy mode in custom mode but if you want to start over with a brand new installation of Emmy deck this is where you would start the next three options have this little plug symbol and that's because they are plugins and these are a little bit more advanced and so I'm not going to go into them here in this video instead I'll make a more advanced video guide for these later on but if you are interested these plugins are great for example power tools will improve the performance of a lot of these emulated systems and then this one called decade controls is really great too after you install that plugin you can go into the quick access menu and then within there you can find the MU deck hotkeys option and here it's going to give you a listing of all the different controller profiles for the different emulated systems and and so for example here we're playing a Nintendo 3DS game and so let's go into the Nintendo 3DS menu and here we see two different tabs first one is the controls tab so you can see what button does what within the games but then also there's a hotkey section so you can immediately reference the different hotkeys that are available the last plugin is also pretty handy it's called gyroscope and as you can imagine this enables the gyroscope within emulated games so for example once you've installed that you can play games like breath of the wild using gyroscopic controls and these work great and so if you are interested in doing that I would definitely check out these plugins next let's check out some of these other tools this one is called Emmy deck compression tool this is going to search your system for compatible ROM files and then convert them to a more compressed format to save you disk space so that's going to be a really handy tool if you don't want to convert them yourself next up we have one called bios Checker this is actually going to look through your file system and make sure you have the right bios files there so if you're not really sure if you installed everything correctly I would recommend going into this app and checking it here now moving on to the next row let's look at some of these features this app is called Cloud sync and it's still in beta but the idea here is that you can basically identify a cloud folder and once you have it set up it's going to upload those save files up into the cloud that way if you ever lose your Emmy deck installation or anything else like that you can still access them later and this is going to be compatible with other platforms too so if you want to sync your save files with a Windows machine or maybe a different retro handheld once this is all set up you should be able to do that too again this is still in beta so I'm going to leave this for a future video now to the right of that we have the cloud services manager this is also a new app within here you have two different options you can manage your cloud services and this will create apps which you can then use to access your favorite streaming services and so if you want to quickly access your Xbox cloud gaming or Netflix this is how you would set that up now the next option is a little bit different these are the remote play clients these are legitimate apps which will set you up with cloud gaming for example chiaki will give you access to PS4 and PS5 Remote Play and then Moonlight and parsec will allow you to stream from your PC onto the steam deck so that's a quick overview of some of the major options you have here within the main mutex screen now you do have a couple other options right here for example you can go to the Emmy deck patreon and sign up right here but I think this is a good stopping point and giving you a general overview of the main me deck screen now if you remember in my intro I showed off two different ways to play your retro games the first is to use emulation station where you can have all these games within one single app but then also you can integrate your favorite games into the main Steam OS interface too and so now in this next section we're going to set all this stuff up and to accomplish that we're going to use the steam ROM manager like I mentioned this is one of the most important apps within mudek and once you launch this it's going to give you a warning that it's going to close out of steam go ahead and press yes and this will take you to this new main screen right here and within this you want to select what they call their parsers and what this means is if you have it toggled on it's going to show up in your main Steam OS interface so for example if you want to have Super Nintendo games showing up in your main Steam OS interface you would make sure that this is toggled on but say for example you have Sega Genesis games installed and you don't want those showing up in your C OS interface here you would make sure that it's toggled off by default these are all going to be turned on so what I recommend doing is actually toggling all of them off then you can turn on the ones you actually want to have in Steam OS this is going to make sure that you don't have a million apps showing up on your Steam OS all at once so let me give you a couple recommendations number one I would definitely recommend turning on emulation station right here this is the app that's going to have all the other games inside so you definitely want to have this one showing up also if you want to access the emulators directly like so for example you want to go into retroarch you want to turn on the emulators toggle right here and then from there you just want to scroll down and then find these systems that you definitely want to have in Steam West and then toggle those on either way take your time and go through and choose which systems you want to show up in Steam OS just bear in mind that they're all going to show up in emulation station regardless so you will have access to your games it's just whether or not you want to have them showing up in your main menu anyway once you're done with all that what you want to do is press this preview button right here and then on the right there's the parse button go ahead and press that one too from there it's going to look through all the folders you chose and then search for each of those files within the steam grid database and what it's going to do is pull all the information in box art directly onto your device and depending on the size of your library this might take a while for example right here you can see I have 126 games altogether now what if you only want to have certain Games showing up in Steam OS well let me show you how to set that up what you want to do is tap on this exclude apps button right here on the bottom from there you can scroll through the library and click on any of the games that you don't want showing up and after you click them they're going to get grayed out so again just take a few minutes here and decide which specific games you want to actually show up so for example with me among the 126 games that I initially had I ended up excluding 103 of them that's because I only want certain games to actually show up in my steamos interface for me I like the idea of less is more because that means I'm going to be more apt to actually play them anyway once you're happy with your selections you want to go up to the top right here and select save exclusions and as you can see that whittled my library down to 23 titles and these really are just going to be the best of the the best right here now there's a couple other things we can do to really improve the experience for example what if you have a game that doesn't show the correct box art this game right here is chameleon kid but as you can see it's not showing any box art at all and there's a couple ways you can fix this the easiest way is to click on the little Hazard button here on the bottom left this is going to search your file name in that database and it'll show you all the available options and as you can see here the first option is kid chameleon so I can just click on that and then within my menu you can see it now has the correct box art now finally you may come to a point where it's showing the wrong game and when you click on the hazard button it's also not giving you the example that you want for example this game here is Sonic spinball but I'm not seeing that as an option now unfortunately there's no real easy way to fix this what you would want to do right here is go back into your SD card and then drill down into the emulation and ROMs folder and then find that original game file as you can see mine is called Sonic the Hedgehog spin Ball but really I think the name of the game is supposed to be Sonic spin ball so to make things easier for me I'm just going to go ahead and rename my ROM right here and now and I obviously I'm going to change the name to Sonic spinball now back in Steam ROM manager all I have to do is press the parse button again and this is going to re-scribe the file system and now it has identified the correct version of Sonic spinball so sometimes the best way to fix the box art is to adjust the file name of the ROM itself okay so after going through and making sure I have the right games in the right box art I'm finally ready to save it into Steam OS and this is super simple all you have to do is press the save to steam button here on the bottom left and on the top right it's going to tell you when it's done adding and removing entries once you see that you are good to go you can go ahead and close out a steam ROM manager and you can also close out of emu deck and of course bear in mind you can do this process as many times as you like so if you add a game or two you can just go through Steam ROM manager once again either way I'm happy with my setup right now so let's go ahead and close out of Emmy deck and now I'm going to click on the return to gaming mode option here on the top left now when we get back into the main Steam OS interface you can see that everything looks the same but if we go into the menu here and select library and then as we tap over you can see there are some new options for example under collections we can now see a bunch of emulated systems and these here will correspond to the ones that you parsed within the steam raw manager additionally within the non-steam tab this is where we're going to find everything that we parsed and starting up these games is going to be very similar to starting up any other steam game you can just select it and then launch it and it should pop right up so let me give you a couple pointers as you start to actually play your games now for most of these systems what you want to do to exit a game is hold on to the select button and then press start and that'll close out of the game and the emulator at once and for the games that are running through retroarch they're actually going to do that auto save Auto load thing that we mentioned before so here if I start up a Super Nintendo game again you can see that it's going right back to where I was when I first closed it out and like I mentioned that is going to be super handy let's try out a couple other examples just to give you an idea of how this is going to go for example with PlayStation 2 games these will boot right up but for PS2 in particular you'll find that the default setting is actually the native resolution and you may want to actually play this in the original style which has these big chunky pixels but if you'd rather have a sharper display you can also upscale it to do this you're going to use a special hotkey where you hold on to the start button and then press up or down on the d-pad pressing it up is going to increase the upscale and then pressing it down will drop it back down and for PS2 3x resolution is going to look really nice however some games may not play at full speed so you may have to drop them down to 2x God of War is a great example this is one that I would recommend playing at a 2X resolution now moving over to GameCube in Wii you have the exact same upscale options here so you can hold on to the start button and then press up and down to adjust it to your liking and for this one most games will play at a 3X resolution at full speed now in previous versions of me deck when you started up a system you had to create an input profile for it however like I mentioned earlier in the video now with the new version of steam ROM manager you don't have to actually do that if we open up the menu here and then go into controller settings you can see that it's already using the CMU input profile so this is great you don't actually have to do anything additional to play these games as you would like and for certain systems they they have this new quick menu right here to bring this up all you have to do is just move your thumb around the left track pad and this will give you a bunch of different options for example on 3DS you can swap the screens or change the layout or you could also enable fast forward to get through some of those slower parts and there's a bunch of different emulators that now have this function so I would recommend trying this out depending on what you're playing and finally when it comes to gameplay let's talk a little bit about emulation station this is the app that will have all of your games inside of it regardless of whether or not you put them within the steam ROM manager so when booting this up you can see I have a lot more systems available and there's a bunch of games too basically every single ROM that you add to your SD card is going to show up within here and starting up these games is exactly the same as it is within the main Steam OS interface now one thing you may notice is that the list of games is a little bit plain and so if we want to add things like box art and videos we can do that here within emulation station to set this up you want to press the start button and then go into the scraper section and for the best results you want to have an account with a website called screen scraper.fr this is also totally free to set up once you have an account go into the account settings section here and then add your username and password after that I would recommend going into the scrape the system section and then pick whatever systems you want to add the box art to we're just going to do an example right here so I'm going to pick Sega Dreamcast from there you can just select start and this will go through and download the box art and videos for each of your games and once it's done we can go into the Dreamcast section and you can see right here that all three of these games now have box art and the information too so this is going to make it a much nicer user interface another new Option with the latest version of emulation station is that we have a theme downloader you can find this within the UI settings section here it'll give you a warning the very first time and it will take a minute to download the themes list but after that you can browse through the different themes that we have available and if you find one that you like you can go ahead and download it right here previously adding your own themes was a little bit harder to set up either way I like this one here called retrofix so we're going to pick this one from there within the UI settings menu we can change the theme set and so now I'll pick the retrofix one and yeah look at that we have this nice new theme and I think it looks really good either way this is how emulation station works this is a great place to put lots of games without having to take up a lot of space within Steam OS and finally to close out of emulation station you just want to press the start button then go down to quit emulation station and confirm and just like that you'll be right back into the main steamos interface and as an example here I've gone through and I've scraped all of my different games and so this is what it's going to look like when you've gone through and added all of your box art and I think this looks great it's a very nice navigation experience anyway that's really about it for this comprehensive look at the new version of emu deck and how it can work for you I realized this was a little bit longer of a video but I think there was a lot of good nuggets within here in the end I think that setting up Emmy deck is a really fun experience if you've ever tried to set up individual emulators on a computer then you know that it can be quite a pain and really that's what makes mutex so wonderful because not only is it going to find the most recent version of every single emulator but it's also going to pre-configure all those settings for you so you don't have to mess that yourself and with all the bells and whistles that they've been adding I think there's a really great opportunity here to curate your emulation experience and so if you want a very simple setup or if you want to really get into the weeds mu deck will help you out either way and like I mentioned if you run into any issues I would recommend checking out the Emmy deck wiki page or their Discord and then of course you also have my own steam deck emulation guide either way let me know what you think 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: 415,538

Keywords:

Id: Y5r2WZAImuY

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023