Steam Deck (handheld from Valve) - shipping is 4-8 days from NL to UK

[Mallet]

I see the 64gb version is now listed as out of stock with no ETA, you can't order it at all. Has that happened before?

[ph0rce]

Ordered a 512 over the weekend after deliberating for several weeks about whether I ‘needed’ one or not, starting to get excited now. 😊

 

Got quite a few Steam games from about ten years ago, most of which I never completed at the time, to work my way through. I also like idea of emulation too, it’d be nice to play F-Zero or LTTP without having to work out how to setup the SNES on our current tv.
 

I haven’t dabbled in anything PC based ( emulation, games, nothing ) in at least 10 years so I’m probably a little out of touch; I know we don’t openly discuss ROMs, BIOSes, etc on the forum for obvious reasons but if someone who has some more recent experience than me in how that scene works now & doesn’t mind sending me a PM so I can ask some basic questions, I’d appreciate it. 
 

Thanks. 
 

Oh, and based off various posts I’m this thread I picked up Vampire Survivors & that Forklift game to try too, both of which look interesting. 

[Gotters]

Ping me a pm if you want @ph0rce, I've gone from zero knowledge on emulation to having some in recent months, we do also have a steam deck emulation thread in Retro with a lot of good info.

 

Think I'm going to leave the PS3 stuff alone now though, it just seems to all run so 'hot' and even the smaller simple download games like Trash Panic (tetris in a bin) have the fans blowing hard.

 

Seeing as it's always in the top 10 then a PSA that the recent update seems to have broken Binding of Isaac

 

I'm so in love with the Forklift game, the main levels are all fairly vanilla in terms of items, but once you hit the DLC levels (which I think are so called as were DLC on the Switch version which came first) things get really interesting, with you needing to use different forklifts with more capacity and more importantly balance your loads properly, you can't do a J spin full speed in reverse with a transit van on your forks in the impound lot.

[BubbleFish]

RE Forklift. Where am I going wrong? Even in training I can’t finish so must be missing something stupidly obvious… I take the pallet and put it where the red box is. Once it’s delivered the red box turns white so I’m assuming it’s in the right area however even when I park in the designated area to finish it won’t and the pallet indicator shows 0/1

 

🤔

[thesnwmn]

1 minute ago, BubbleFish said:

RE Forklift. Where am I going wrong? Even in training I can’t finish so must be missing something stupidly obvious… I take the pallet and put it where the red box is. Once it’s delivered the red box turns white so I’m assuming it’s in the right area however even when I park in the designated area to finish it won’t and the pallet indicator shows 0/1

 

🤔

 

The red box goes green if you have it in the right place. You've not been accurate enough.

[BubbleFish]

Ah. Thanks 

[Siri]

Got myself ready to DDoS the Diablo 4 server with anyone else this afternoon - thankfully, found an old battle.net install and worked from there instead of trying to find where the fuck I put Diablo II Remastered and Immortal (which I really should, as they're *somewhere* in the billions of files between the SD card and the SSD).

 

Everyone including myself will likely shit on D4 not having server capacity for a test, but one thing I do appreciate is the game offering Ultra HD textures as a separate download. A 40gb download was much more manageable before I got to bed.

 

I also bothered to link up more of the games I had on the SD card - namely, THPS1&2. seems to work great, and it's dropping connection to the online services less now (and as a result tank the framerate), touch wood.

 

Still haven't got my head around enabling GPL, though. It'll have to wait until the D4 beta is over.

[bradigor]

Sorry, what is GPL?

[Poet]

It's arriving today! My dock is a day or so behind, so will probably get that after the weekend.

 

That 2-4 weeks delivery time ended up being 4 days...

[thesnwmn]

26 minutes ago, bradigor said:

Sorry, what is GPL?

 

I assume it's the GraphicsPipelineLibrary. A piece of rendering tech that's designed, I believe, to reduce the shader compilation stutter for non-Steam games.

 

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/proton-ge-7-44-is-released/

[Siri]

1 minute ago, thesnwmn said:

 

I assume it's the GraphicsPipelineLibrary. A piece of rendering tech that's designed, I believe, to reduce the shader compilation stutter for non-Steam games.

 

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/proton-ge-7-44-is-released/

 

Yep, that's it. It's been in Proton for a while (As part of DXVK, which handles DX9/10/11, but only affects DX11), but it couldn't be used on AMD hardware because neither the official (RADV) or Open Source (Mesa) drivers didn't have the Vulkan backend stuff to run it.

 

It's been added to both now and has been rolled out as part of SteamOS updates, but as it's still in testing phases you have to use a command to activate it (RADV_PERFTEST=gpl).

 

I haven't had success, though - I've been looking at the DX11 logs and it hasn't triggered enabling it while playing EGS games (which is where it's more beneficial, because they can't access a shader cache distribution like Steam offers). I'm wondering if the latest Mesa/RADV stuff was only implemented in a preview SteamOS update that I'm not on, but I don't want to fuck around with it until Diablo 4's beta weekend is finished. One less headache to worry about, if you dig.

[Poet]

It arrived one minute before my daily stand up. Told my team as I was opening it. I wasn't waiting.

 

"Poet is going to be super productive today." Yes. Yes I am. They know.

 

Oh, and my Dock arrived the same time - just not updated online!

[Popo]

Welcome to the family! We’re all massive Deck heads in here. 

[Gotters]

2 hours ago, BubbleFish said:

RE Forklift. Where am I going wrong? Even in training I can’t finish so must be missing something stupidly obvious… I take the pallet and put it where the red box is. Once it’s delivered the red box turns white so I’m assuming it’s in the right area however even when I park in the designated area to finish it won’t and the pallet indicator shows 0/1

 

🤔

 

yep as said you need to be more accurate placing the delivery down, the game really wants you to use all the camera angles at different times - the general 3d one is fine for razzing round the levels (but you do often need to rotate it to find the letters or posters) then you need a combo of the in cab view for lining up some pick ups with your prongs (and height for drop offs) and overhead for precise delivery into a space.

 

its such a fluid instant setup that when you get into the zone with it you can really pull off some nifty moves.

 

the physics are mostly pretty good too, you can use a sudden shift of speed to move an unbalanced item on your forks back into being supported.

 

its only a £5 forklift game but a title done with a rare degree of polish, precision and thoroughness by the developer.

[Lorfarius]

Still hve nightmares about the mess of Diablo 3's first few days 🤣 Going to leave buying it for a few weeks, so much other stuff to play thanks to the sale so it can wait.

[Poet]

Initial impressions after opening the box, set up, putting in a new SD card and starting to download a load of the (just Steam for now) games: Wow! it's even nicer to hold and so much better to use than I was expecting. In terms of, well, everything. And just the general UI is miles ahead of where I thought it would be.

 

Now that I've taken the best part of an hour just doing all that stuff and faffing around, I'll have to endure a very short lunch break and wait until this evening I think before I actually play anything. Tinkering and adding non-Steam stuff can wait a while.

[ph0rce]

Mine has also arrived, again in four days, which is crazy as by the time I ordered mine, the message had changed from 'ships in 1 to 2 weeks' to 'heavy demand, delayed shipping possible, etc'!

 

I don't think I need the official dock, any recommendation for one of the third party ones please? I know there's been a variety sprinkled through the thread but I'm not sure if one is considered better than the others?

[Strafe]

Diablo 4 isn’t on steam so I guess it’s a Battle.net exclusive. Did anyone get the beta going on deck and how easy/hard is it to do so?

[Siri]

3 minutes ago, ph0rce said:

I don't think I need the official dock, any recommendation for one of the third party ones please? I know there's been a variety sprinkled through the thread but I'm not sure if one is considered better than the others?

 

Generally that's the case - unless you're after something specific (like the M2 slot on that one JSAUX dock, or Displayport/Freesync on the Valve dock), they pretty much offer the same stuff on a sliding scale of features to price.

 

Just make sure it has a Gigabit Ethernet port and maybe a HDMI port with a 4k60fps signal, and you're probably good with whatever Amazon has a deal on at that moment in time. Even then, you might not need that stuff, either, which then that makes it incredibly inexpensive.

[Lorfarius]

6 minutes ago, Strafe said:

Diablo 4 isn’t on steam so I guess it’s a Battle.net exclusive. Did anyone get the beta going on deck and how easy/hard is it to do so?

 

None of the Blizzard games are on Steam but you can add them to Deck.

[Siri]

2 minutes ago, Strafe said:

Diablo 4 isn’t on steam so I guess it’s a Battle.net exclusive. Did anyone get the beta going on deck and how easy/hard is it to do so?

 

I've installed it, but I haven't ran it yet. I have played other Blizzard games on the deck, though.

 

It shouldn't be hard by following any recent video guide - essentially, they all boil down to running the battle.net installer in proton, finding the files you installed and running the launcher, and then installing the game you want. As an extra thing, you can link to the game's launcher directly and making it share the same files as battle.net, but just having battle.net is enough.

[ph0rce]

7 minutes ago, Siri said:

 

Generally that's the case - unless you're after something specific (like the M2 slot on that one JSAUX dock, or Displayport/Freesync on the Valve dock), they pretty much offer the same stuff on a sliding scale of features to price.

 

Just make sure it has a Gigabit Ethernet port and maybe a HDMI port with a 4k60fps signal, and you're probably good with whatever Amazon has a deal on at that moment in time. Even then, you might not need that stuff, either, which then that makes it incredibly inexpensive.

 

Only £30 for the JSAUX one from Amazon ( no Gigabit enthernet ) so that's a pretty easy choice, should arrive tomorrow, thanks.

[Lorfarius]

Ivolver one is cheaper at £28. I've had this for months and its pretty good.

[StumpyJohn]

I went with the posher iVolver one that has ethernet too.  Think it was just under £40

[ph0rce]

Potentially, if I end up playing this as my main console, I might pick up another dock for the other room to avoid messing about!

[ph0rce]

Any SD card manufacturers I should be avoiding, or ideally, any I should definitely be choosing?

 

Not sure if they are all basically the same thing these days?

[Lorfarius]

3 minutes ago, ph0rce said:

Any SD card manufacturers I should be avoiding, or ideally, any I should definitely be choosing?

 

Not sure if they are all basically the same thing these days?

 

Stick to Amazon or official sites as way to easy to get pirated cards these days.

[Siri]

Alright, started up Diablo IV and it's in the queue.

 

100% GPU utilisation while in the queue even with desktop GPUs, though?

 

*Sets TDP to 3w so it's 99% of fuck all*

 

lol

[StumpyJohn]

56 minutes ago, ph0rce said:

Any SD card manufacturers I should be avoiding, or ideally, any I should definitely be choosing?

 

Not sure if they are all basically the same thing these days?

The Samsung EVO Plus and PRO Plus ones are usually highly recommended but anything that is Application Performance Class2 (A2) should be alright

[Stanley]

2 hours ago, StumpyJohn said:

I went with the posher iVolver one that has ethernet too.  Think it was just under £40

This one ? I have that and it’s really good, nice weighty feel and the back of it doesn’t obscure the vent on the Deck.