I really liked it for retro gaming but the screen, size, and weight werent ideal for me. I ended up getting the Odin Mini (2?) and its perfect. Handles some Wii U games flawlessly
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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It works great for emulation. Emudeck will install pretty much everything you need to get started, you can configure it more if you want or do everything manually as well, but it works well enough for me. There's a few systems you need bios files for, Google can help you find them pretty easily.
I use emulation station (es-de) to launch roms from gaming mode on the deck. It has some cool features to add metadata to your list of games so you can have box art and things in the menus. It also works to keep roms separated from other games in gaming mode.
The only systems that don't work well are the more modern ones. Xbox, 360, PS3 are pretty rough or have spotty game support. Switch works fairly well, but it's more complicated to get working but still possible with some googling.
You'll want to get a few things to make everything easier to work with. A Bluetooth mouse/keyboard or a hub to connect wired ones is helpful in desktop mode to do the set up and configuration work. A hub is also useful to connect a flash drive to transfer time to the deck. You'll want an external sd card to hold everything, 256gb is probably the smallest you want, but it depends on how many and which systems you want roms for, everything pre 6th gen is pretty small.
Very comprehensive, I appreciate it! Leaning towards buying one towards the summer.
It's just a PC with integrated gamepad. Almost all emulators work on Linux as well. It's even powerful enough to run Switch games. I've emulated everything from C64 over general Mame, PS1 and up to Switch.
The only "suboptimal" thing is that it doesn't have the best button layout for N64 and Sega consoles. Still Starfox 64 was a lot of fun.
ScummVM and DOSBox also run great. And I love that I can easily configure the controls to play adventure games with one hand on either side.
Honestly, there is hardly anything it can't do.
Yeah the Steam Deck sounds more tempting every day tbh...
It has been a literal lifesaver. Long COVID has tied me to my bed and with the Deck I can at least keep playing games.
"powerful enough to run switch games..."
Either I have a bad setup (which I most likely do) for the emulator or it's a game by game situation because I tried playing the new Sonic x Shadows Generations on my switch for the Shadow story. It was fairly laggy and I had to hard resety Deck after using a certain move because it caused everything to freeze.
Emulation definitely worked perfectly when I tried playing fire emblems engage, though, so I'm gonna say it's a problem with SxSG instead of a bad setup issue.
I bought my deck predominantly to play PS2 games and it’s great at it. Unfortunately, my Steam backlog showed up and reminded me it has other uses so I haven’t spent that much time emulating on it.
I have a Steam Deck, Miyoo Mini Plus, and Retroid Pocket 5. Even though the Deck gets cumbersome, it's still what I use 99% of the time. One of the best game devices I've ever had.
It is a pretty good experience, especially with upscaling of older systems.
My favorite is when games have been decomp/ported so they have quality of life improvements. This allows for stuff like widescreen 60-fps Perfect Dark.
It works great! I have only used EmuDeck, but it's a bit complicated to set up and add games. There is also RetroDeck, but I have not used it myself. You can also just install Retroarch in Steam, but I wouldn't recommend for games past N64/PS1 era, as there's a bit of a performance hit compared to the dedicated emulators the others use.
Awesome, looks great! I don't mind a "complicated" setup as long as I don't need to go in and fix stuff afterwards. Thanks for the reply :)
To answer your question, yes, and I highly recommend it! The screen is huge and beautiful and it emulates games amazingly. In addition, it plays half? of the Steam library. There are so many awesome indie games and modern retro games like The Messenger that make the Steam Deck such a compelling handheld console.
My thoughts on Emudeck:
I tried Emudeck at first and ended up uninstalling it. It doesnt do anything you can't do manually, and it did things I didn't like.
Disclaimer, I am not a RetroArch "pro", but I've been using it for decades. I know a lot of its quirks, and how to do pretty much everything.
Emudeck has these global options to let you map hotkeys, aspect ratios, and choose whether or not you want shaders enabled for consoles (CRT shaders) or handhelds (LCD shaders). Plus other things. It's yes or no for each thing, mostly, and it will configure all emulators tonsuit your options. Not RetroArch and any standalones.
The way it configures these things in RetroArch is by saving override files. I will admit I don't fully understand override files, but I do use preset files a lot. In any case, I was unable to save any of my custom changes in RetroArch. I would find some setting I didn't like, or some hotkey I wanted to change because Emudeck's default didn't suit me, and I could change it while RA was running, but then if I tried to save my options, it wouldn't let me because "override file in use". That was very frustrating.
So I ended up uninstalling it and manually installing RetroArch from the app store ("Discover"). And if I needed DuckStation or some other standard-alone that worked better than RA (or a Switch emulator or something), I just installed the flatpack and confiured it myself.
You also don't need EmuDeck to install ROM Manager which let's you add specific ROMs to your Steam Library, although I have not done that myself yet. I don't think it's a killer feature, really. Not worth the effort. I just launch RetroArch where I have a Favorites menu and a History menu. I did have to manually add RetroArch to Steam which is trivially easy in desktop mode (right click the icon and click "Add to Steam"). Then I used a Decky plugin to configure art for it. Decky is awesome, BTW. It's a whole plugin system for the Steam Deck.
In the end, EmuDeck did nothing I couldn't do myself, and made it worse for a RetroArch power user like myself. Just my two cents.
I've been wondering this exact thing lately. I've got a retro handheld that is breaking because the company seems to have used cheap parts internally, and they no longer support repairs or selling the parts. After only a year of owning it, I feel pretty annoyed, so started looking at alternatives. Steam deck was one I was considering, but the price point means I'll need to save for a while.
RetroDeck is the best way in my opinion.
It differes from other solutions as it creates a containered application to run all your emulators.
This means everything is kept tidy isolated from the rest of your system under RetroDeck, if you have any errors it's simple to wipe and start again without losing your ROMs, its simple to try new systems in the future.
I installed Retroarch on Steam and wrote a script in desktop-mode to point it's default folder to my emulation files hosted on a home server (raspberry pi w/ external drive). I loaded the script into steam as a non-steam "game" and can run it in game-mode so once it was all set up it's literally two clicks to get to an enormous library of retro+arcade games.
Yeah, I play a lot of emulated retro games on my deck. I used Emudeck to get set up but I've heard Retrodeck is another good option. It works very well for me.
https://emudeck.github.io/ makes setting up a lot of emulators pretty easy on the deck.
i've played mario sunshine and the metroid prime games on it, so i'd think most of the wii and gamecube games wont be a problem.
hell, people are playing switch and some ps3 games on it so i everything from before the gamecubes generation will probably be fine, unless the emulators for a system are not in a great state in general.
This is the way. Takes the hassle out of everything.
That's probably one of the most common use cases for the Steam deck, I've played a ton of emulated games and had a great time. Its far from perfect, especially for newer consoles, but pretty much anything GameCube and below is at least runnable
Archive.org is the best source of safe roms, who knows how long that will last though
It’s honestly all I use mine for. There are very few PC games that I play that feel good on the deck but the majority of retro games feel excellent. I also seldom use mine as a portable I have it docked to one TV or another to work.
Just for clarity because I don’t want people to think I’m saying the steam deck is a bad PC gaming substitute the games that I play specifically don’t work well without a mouse and a keyboard. I play a lot of Rogue likes like dungeon crawl, stone soup and I play a lot of Dwarf Fortress and I haven’t found a way to get comfortable controller schemes that remotely compared to just using my mouse and keyboard
most of my gaming is retro games on the sd. it works great assuming you can get roms post rompocalypse.
Search torrent sites for goodmerge/complete etc and they will be there.
Disclaimer: I do not own a Steam Deck.
From my loose understanding, it should be doable.
But it might really help if you state the platform you want to emulate.
PSP? DOS?
Nobody knows...
GameCube and older!
You're golden then, I do Wii and earlier on mine, 360 games run but I haven't really played much with them. I quite like the deck for emulation and it runs old titles well (and recent stuff too, I really liked Nine Sols, it's not a demanding game though, apparently cyberpunk plays well on the deck, not tried that though)
I bought an LCD model when they were really cheap, still a good model and solid device, but I got my partner an oled one as a gift, I highly recommend that one if it's in your budget, it looks better, has HDR and a better battery life.
I don't have a steam deck, but my understanding is that would work pretty well. Might be overkill though, I emulate GameCube games with few problems on an android phone from a few years ago with a cheap Bluetooth controller
It emulates the switch pretty well, at least in some games (I have not tried more than half a dozen).
It works great, at least for everything I've tried. Newest consoles I've emulated are GameCube, Dreamcast, PSP. I would recommend EmuDeck as a launcher for your games, I set it up on my and my spouse's Decks and it's been working really well.
In my opinion the Deck is one of the nicest options for handheld emulation right now. If you play PC games as well it's an easy recommend.
However, if you're only doing older console games you can get one of those emulation handhelds for a fraction of the cost. I don't want to say you should go that route, I just want to make sure you're aware of all the options!
You may want to ask here: https://sopuli.xyz/c/steamdeck
Link to the community on your own instace: [email protected]
Thank you! Didn't notice Sync didn't parse the correct link.
It depends on what you want to emulate and if emulation is your primary concern. There are a lot of handheld emulators out there that are cheaper and can offer a smoother experience thanks to their custom firmware.
If you are looking for something to primarily play a specific console like GBA/DS or want to play less demanding consoles like PSX and below I'd say there are better options.
Personally I use my Steam Deck to play games, not just emulate retro games.
I’m struggling to understand why you felt the need to post this hot take in a retro gaming help thread.
I think they meant to say they also play Steam games on it, which I will say is a really good benefit of the Steam Deck over any of the Android handheld retro systems.
If someone's trying to decide between a Steam Deck and a $300 Retro Handheld that can play through Game Cube, PS2, etc., I would try to convince them to buy the Steam Deck because it opens up a whole world of games.