Comment on Getting a Steam Deck to emulate retro games?

• CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  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 professional, but I’ve been using it for decades. I know a lot of its quirks, and hiw to do pretty much eveththing i want.

  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.

  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), just installed the flatpack and confiured it myself.

  You also done need EmuDeck to install ROM Manager which let’s you add specific ROMs to your Steam Library.

  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.

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