The Ultimate Steam Deck Emulation Setup

[Music] hey everybody this is roster metro gamecore so i've had the steam deck for a few weeks now and i've been messing with it almost every day and so today we're just gonna do a really casual low-key video about how i have the device set up for my own personal needs i think along the way you're gonna see some pretty interesting things that i've set up primarily the front-end experience has been really important to me and so within here i've made a sampling of just the regular steam games that i access as well as individual games that are running through emulators and the list here has been highly curated everything here has been thought through pretty thoroughly when it comes to the steam games themselves you know i have a relatively light library i found that i mostly prefer games that i can quickly jump in and out of and battery life has been important to me too and so for that reason i really haven't focused on aaa games for the most part i've put the most essential ones in the favorites these are the games that i really want to spend some time with and as you can see they're a mix of emulated games as well as traditional steam games when it comes to emulation i've really pared this down to just my essentials i want to have access to all of my emulation content but i don't want to see it front and center instead i've been trying to keep the list to about 20-25 games altogether this allows me to really laser focus on the games i'm actually going to play and i've set all these up individually via a tool called emudec and i've made a video about this before but it has been updated slightly since that last video so we'll take care of that update in this video here but yeah for the most part i have each of these emulated games set up as an individual steam game so i'll boot it up like any other pc game and just like that i'm playing prime hack which is a dolphin fork of metroid prime which allows for dual analog controls now all of my emulated games are still available to me they're just not front and center and most of these are hidden behind emulation station and this is a really handy tool for your emulation library if you've ever used something like raspberry pi or one of those retro handhelds you're going to be familiar with this but within here i have hundreds of my emulated games again the list is somewhat short just to kind of keep things tight and simple but this is how i would access it if i had a hankering for some random retro game and yeah like i mentioned before i've been sticking with mostly platformers and lower end games things like ori and the will of the wisps or even shadow complex remastered i've put almost 5 hours into this game which is a lot for me and it's kind of cool that right alongside it is an emulated ps2 game just kind of there in my library another thing i've been playing around with is xbox cloud gaming now this actually has official support from microsoft there's even a microsoft page that tells you how to get this all up and running and i'm not going to run you through those steps because they are relatively easy it's a bit time consuming maybe 5-10 minutes to get it all up and going but after that it's a piece of cake to get these games running when you open up this cloud gaming app it's actually just going to open up the edge browser and then go directly to that web page and then once you log in you can access your entire game pass library the gameplay experience is not the best i do feel a little bit of lag when i'm playing but i would say this is probably the easiest way to access your microsoft games library without having to flash windows over your steam os now in addition to emulated games i do have some non-emulated linux based games installed as well this one here is a good example and so in addition to this quick update of how to set this all up i'll also show you how to install standalone linux games too so i think it's time to dive into the how to section of the video so let's go into desktop mode here we're going to press the steam button then power then switch to desktop okay so here we are in desktop mode i've also added a usb mouse just to make things a little bit easier to navigate now i've kept my desktop pretty clean i just have the return to gaming mode then the emu deck which we'll install here in a second and then the steamrom manager first thing you want to do is exit out of steam because this affects the steamroll manager and then we're going to open up a browser and navigate to mudec.com this has had some recent updates to the website and i'll walk you through those real quick first thing you may notice is that the experience is a lot more streamlined it used to be 10 steps altogether and now the step has been paired down to just five and that's because a lot of these steps have been automated within the app and this isn't going to be a deep dive tutorial a lot of that stuff is still applicable for my previous mu deck video but i'll just quickly walk you through the things that i personally do the first thing you may notice is there's only one installer app now so all you have to do is install this one here and then i've thrown it on my desktop just go ahead and click on the app to get it started and it'll run through a download of the initial assets it'll then ask whether or not you want to have your game stored on the internal storage or an sd card personally i put everything on my sd card so i'm going to choose that next if you're running this as an update it's going to ask you which configurations you want to keep by default emudec is going to preconfigure all of the emulators for you but if you have one of these emulators tweaked perfectly then you can click one of these and it'll preserve your configurations personally i've gone through and made all sorts of tiny little tweaks to mine so i'm just gonna check all of them but this is kind of a rare case i would say that typically you're going to leave this unchecked and let mu deck configure everything for you at this point emidek is actually going to grab and install all those emulators for you you no longer have to do this by hand and so this is going to save you a lot of time in the long run next it'll create a folder where all your games are going to go and here it's also going to ask you whether or not you want to preserve your previous customizations but yeah actually we're set up at this point it's going to show you the directories where to put your roms and bios files and then a reminder if you're going to be using the wii u emulator you'll have to use a compatibility layer and there are more detailed instructions about that on the emudec website so let's go to the sd card and have a look what you'll find is there's going to be a folder called emulation that's the one we're going to use and inside here there are three subfolders bios roms and tools inside the tools folder you're going to find emulation station and then you're going to want to put all of your system files your bios files inside the bios folder i've got a whole collection here it's called a retroarch bios pack but you'll have to do some googling to find that and the most important folder is going to be the one called roms within here there's going to be a subfolder for each of the systems that you can add to steam deck so what you'll want to do here is grab your rom library and then move each of these individual console files into the corresponding folder now i can't share where to find rom files or even bios files because those are copyrighted but you're going to be on your own to build all this yourself luckily the developer has been super helpful in kind of organizing everything for you if you go down to the bottom of their page there's an faq section and then if you click here you can actually go to their github page and within here there's a section that will show you a specific system what the standard emulator is for it and then most importantly what file types are accepted and so if you have any question about which files you're supposed to be adding this is going to be your best bet right here on top of that the developers made a really handy cheat sheet which will show you the various hotkeys for each of the emulators and these are mostly standardized but some of these programs are a little bit different from the others and so it is good to consult this if you're having issues with say for example exiting a game anyway that's about it you basically just need to consult that table to see which file types to add then add in your games and you're good to go now let's actually add them to the steam deck we're going to use the steam rom manager for this part and this should be pre-installed the moment you run emudec now this interface can be a little bit intimidating but i'll walk you through it it's actually pretty simple on the left hand side you're going to see a listing of what they call parsers these are basically individual configurations for each of your different systems and this has all been set up for you individually and so think of each of these as an individual system that will show up in your steam deck once you've run this program for example there's an emulation station one here if you want that showing up in steemos then you're going to leave it as it is but say for example you have some nintendo gamecube games that you don't want to show up in steam os only in the emulation station well if that's the case then you would select gamecube here and then you would disable the current parser and then of course hit save and what that basically means is that it will no longer add those games to your steamos interface and so you can go through these one by one and turn them off and in fact there's actually an even easier way to do this if you take the left hand menu here and then you kind of drag it a little bit to the right to widen it you can just individually turn each of these ones off and so my recommendation here is to be pretty liberal when turning these ones off for the most part i'm only going to turn on the systems that i definitely want to see in the steam os interface so at the end of the day i end up turning off more than i actually leave on anyway once that's done you're going to go up to preview here and then select generate app list this is going to go through all those folders that you left on and then scrub those individual games for their box art and other information and this will take a minute to run through everything but as you can see here there's 136 files that's still way more games than i want to actually use so now let's go through and kind of individualize these i'm going to set it to the poster view here because that's what you're going to see primarily when you're in the steam operating system now like with my previous emu deck video you can go through and customize each of these so you can change the box art or you can add new box art or change the name of the game you can do all that stuff yourself and actually don't want to keep most of these games in my steam library but for now there's no option in the tool to unselect a certain game you basically have to grab them by system but that's no big deal we can change that here in a second what we're going to do next is actually save the app list this is going to push everything over to steam what i do recommend is going over to the event log and making sure that you wait until it says that it's done this could take anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes okay now once that's been run we're actually going to jump into steam and do one last configuration to make sure everything's nice and pretty we'll go into the library and as you can see here all those games have now been added they've also been organized by different emulated system but like i mentioned before i don't want every single one of these games showing up in steam in fact for 3ds there's only a few i want to keep so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to right click on an individual game then select manage and then remove non-steam game this isn't going to delete the game or anything like that it's just going to remove it from steam and so i'm going to go through each of these systems and remove all the ones that i don't want showing up in the steam os system and you know i had about 135 games here so it took me maybe three minutes altogether to remove all the ones that i don't want actually showing up and this will be all up to you but i basically paired it down from 135 to about 25 games altogether and so i'd say out of all of these this is probably the most tedious step but it is necessary if you want to have a nice clean interface like mine and remember you're going to be able to access all these games through emulation station anyway this is really all about whether or not you want a game to show up in the steam interface or if you want to access it through emulation station in addition to paring down your library you can also add certain ones to your favorites that means they'll show up in their own individual tab in the steam operating system so in the end i've added about 25 non-steam games and i've left about 10 of those as favorites and your favorites can be a mixture of emulated games as well as just your typical steam games too okay now let's talk about adding individual games to your library and we'll start with itch io this is a wonderful platform for finding the latest and greatest indie games and many of these are available for free it's actually a really great place to check out new games if you go into the linux side you can see there are nearly 60 000 games available and you can go through and maybe sort them by the top selling games and so on so let's pick a game to download let's try friday night funken if you click on it it'll take you to the game page you can read more about it but there's going to be a download section here and as you can see it does have a linux version now this game is free but you can also give a donation to the developer as well and you can pay as little or as much as you want but you do you but for now we're just going to go to the download section and use this as a demonstration when you get to the final download page it's going to ask you which format you want to use it in we're going to pick the linux version that's it we're just going to save it to our downloads folder and so if you're like me and you already have an hio account and you've already purchased some games then they'll show up here in your profile and so let's download one from there too we're gonna grab a short hike this one also has a linux version make sure you grab the most recent version and so if you've ever bought a bundle from this platform for example the ukraine bundle that was available last month you may have access to hundreds if not thousands of games already and i would recommend to focus on the ones that have linux versions but just for kicks we're going to try a windows based game as well and so here i've downloaded a short hike and friday night funken like you saw but then i also downloaded zero ranger which is a windows only game i'm going to see if i can get this one running here on the steam deck so first thing we want to do is unzip each of these files and leave them in their own subfolders and it's actually pretty easy to set this up you just right click on a file and select extract archive here auto detect subfolder and that'll unzip everything and then create its own folder at that point you can delete all the zip files and like i said zero ranger is a windows based game so as you can see here it has an exe file okay so now that we have these three extracted let's go ahead and add them to steam and make sure that they work so we're going to open up steam here again and then select add a non-steam game then we're going to go to browse then home deck then downloads and in here you can find our three folders now starting with a short hike if you open up that folder you're not going to see anything that's because you need to go in here and change it to all files and typically what you want to do for a linux game is find the one that doesn't have a file extension that's going to be this one here so select that and then go add selected game and then scroll down your library to find that file and i think first thing is to check it to make sure that it actually will run so we'll press play here and yeah sure enough just like that it does work okay so we're good to go next thing i want to change the name so we're going to right click select properties and then you can change the name right here i'm going to change it to a short hike now let's go through and actually make it look nice too we're going to go to steamgriddb.com within here we're going to search for each individual game and so here is a short hike and on this page you'll find all the artwork that you're going to want to add to this game and i go into more detail about this in my previous videos but in a nutshell you're going to grab all of the visual assets that you would use for the game itself they're going to be called a poster a grid a hero a logo and then an icon and i'll walk you through those real quick we'll start with the icon we're going to just hit the download button and then select save image as i'm going to change this to something memorable like short hike icon now we'll go back to steam right click and go properties and then we'll click on this little square navigate to wherever it is you save that image for me it's a folder called steam boxes i'm going to select all files here and then i'm going to find short hike icon there we go now we have a little icon on the left of the menu here now let's right click on the banner and select set custom background this is what they call the hero so i'm going to find my short hero png file and there we go we can also set a custom logo instead of just seeing a short hike so i'll set that up here next we're going to add the poster and grid we're going to go back into library and then since it's the most recent game that we've played it should show up right here here we're going to go to manage and then set custom artwork and then we'll add the short grid and then finally we want to add the poster this one's the most important and you can scroll down in the library to see all of your posters here and if you want you can change the posters for any of these games so if you don't like the current artwork on any of these you can do this same process to update those too either way we're going to go to a short hike here right click on it again and then manage set custom artwork and then here i'm going to find the image that i downloaded it's going to be a short poster and bam just like that we now have all the artwork assets available for this game and so yeah that's the process to add a linux based game that's not already in steam i'm going to do the same thing here with friday night funken i'm going to go and add the non-scene game and then find the one that doesn't have a file extension and then here it is right here under funken so again we're just going to test it make sure that it boots properly and yeah there we go it works just fine it doesn't go full screen but that's fine it'll actually do that within steamos when we do open it so same thing here we're going to add all those art assets i'm going to kind of breeze through this but you're going to search for the game again and then grab your poster and your grid and hero and all that other stuff so once you have all those downloaded you can see here i've added the icon and the logo and the hero then i can also go into the library section and then add it as a poster as well and then finally make sure you add that grid make sure it's the most recently played game and then you can add it here it's a bit of a workaround to get all this going but you only have to do it one time and so now let's see if we can add that windows game that we downloaded earlier we're going to add a non-steam game here go back to that same folder and this time it's a little bit different we're going to find the exe file that's going to be here at the bottom now if we just click on it here it wouldn't actually play and that's because it's made for windows so we'll have to use a compatibility layer called proton what you want to do is right click on the game and select properties and then go to compatibility and check that first option next it's going to give you different proton versions to use i like to use the 7.01 it seems to work the best and then you can hit play and see if the game will boot and unfortunately it does not i tried all the different proton versions none of them worked so unfortunately this is just a game that's not going to work and it's going to be hit or miss you know not every single windows game is going to work in steam but it's worth experimenting with if you do want to try that either way we're going to remove the game here since it's of no use to us on the steam deck but i would say two out of three is not bad so we have our two linux games added and the windows one unfortunately we weren't able to get working so let me show you one other way to get some windows games working on your device what you'll want to do here is go into the discovery store and then download an app called heroic games launcher this is an open source launcher that will allow you to access your gog and epic game store libraries and so this is what it'll look like here i've already installed cuphead as well as steamworld dig 2. and these are from my gog library now my library on these are not super huge and my epic game store is basically empty so i didn't even add that one but this is what you would do you would go through your library pick the game you want and then you can download and install it from there all you have to do is add this heroic game launcher as a non-steam game like we did with the other linux games and then it'll show up in your steam os and then you can access all of your games that way okay so now it's time to check out the fruits of our labor let's go back into the game os side and let's see how everything looks and to me this looks great everything's nice and streamlined first thing i want to do is check out those linux games to make sure they work properly and yeah i click on friday night funkin and it goes right into the game so everything's working good here [Music] next let's go to a short hike as you can see all that beautiful art has now been added and yeah just like that this one opens up as well so it's kind of a seamless experience it behaves just like any other steam game and then of course we have several different options when it comes to emulation let's try out emulation station first and so like i mentioned previously this is going to take all those games in your roms folder and it's going to organize everything and allow them to launch directly through here now i've added box art and made it nice and pretty and i have an emulation station video on this channel that shows you how to set all this up but long story short all of my rom games are in here even if i've added them as individual games via the steamrom manager they're still going to show up in emulation stations so it's kind of like having the best of both worlds this is going to be my primary emulation interface and i can just jump into games from here and the great thing about pairing this with mu deck is that it's going to preconfigure all the controls and settings for you it's going to give you nice colorization for things like game boy and then also give you nice borders to work with too with other systems typically a setup like this would take like a week or two to set up and you can do it within a matter of minutes with emu deck and because i added certain games to steamroll manager you can see them here as well these are individually emulated games through the same platform and everything but i'm able to access them through the steam os and so this gives you a wide opportunity to not only be able to emulate through the emulation station system but you can also access your individual emulated games through the steam os too and i found that i really prefer doing this on the steam deck over a lot of other systems even though i may have these games on say a different platform it's really nice to have them all in one on the go like this and so yeah that's really it for this video i wanted to show you how i set up my own individual steam deck to basically have everything i want at my fingertips i have all my favorite retro games here at the front menu but i can also jump into emulation station to access everything too as always let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 650,282

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Id: ylErPAL2cj0

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022