Emulation on Steam Deck

[Gotters]

On 14/10/2022 at 07:35, Gotters said:

I've stuck all the roms onto a 128gb card, which surprise surprise I've almost filled. Got a bargain 256gb card from the prime sale. Without a PC can I just move the entire contents of the smaller card onto the main steam deck drive then stick in and format the new card and move it all back ? Hoping emu deck will pick it all up seamlessly.

 

Going to answer myself here in case anybody else finds this useful, suspect I'm not the first and won't be the last to fill an SD card with PS2/Gamecube games in far less time than expected.

 

I had chosen to install emu deck and the roms onto the SD card in the first place.

 

I formatted the new bigger card in the deck and could see it was given the same name as the smaller one ('primary')

 

It helped having the big 512gb steam deck here for next step, I just copied the whole 'emulation' folder from the 128gb card up the deck's onboard storage, safe ejected that card then inserted the 256gb card, and then copied back the emulation folder down to the bigger SD. Takes a while to do the copying, about 30m up bit more back down.

 

My hope was that with the card having the same name and contents that clicking the steam rom manager in desktop mode would work fine and it wouldn't spot the difference, which I'm happy to report is how it behaved.

 

So not complicated, just plug your deck in and leave it chugging away for a couple of big file moves.

 

Final note, the samsung 256gb card I got from Amazon didn't play nice initially on the deck, it did the testing phase to format in then said it couldn't do it, I put the card onto my Mac and formatted it in FAT32, put it back in the deck and it was able to format it fine. Seems the deck can be a bit finicky on formatting empty cards.

[Spleen]

Can't believe how well Ridge Racer 7 on RPCS3 runs, it seems perfect from the bit I played. Brilliant. 

 

Glad I put a 1tb card in my 64 gig.

[Isaac]

Anyone else find Dolphin to be rubbish on this?

 

It seems Gamecube / Wii emulation just isn't there. Switch games run significantly better than any Dolphin game I've played.

[Gotters]

I’m playing with whatever the emudeck settings are for gamecube and been fine, only issue I had is warioware needs starting from the emulator not steam.

[Superunknown]

On 16/10/2022 at 00:54, Isaac said:

Anyone else find Dolphin to be rubbish on this?

 

It seems Gamecube / Wii emulation just isn't there. Switch games run significantly better than any Dolphin game I've played.

Yes. But I recently learned that you can improve Dolphin performance by:

 

1. Use PowerTools to disable all but 3 cores in Steam Deck OS

2. Install Batocera, and create a shell script to disable cores 1, 3,5,6,7 via the command line

 

I found option 2 to be best as you can leave specific cores enabled (apparently the even numbered cores are those with hyper threading). Option 2 gives me a locked 60fps out of F Zero GX at 2x resolution, using the Vulkan renderer, and no additional AF or AA. Tested the first 5 tracks, including one of the sand levels, and it didn't seem to have any problems. 

[Ketchup]

Starting to mess around with this and have come up with a couple of issues.

 

1. Not all games are appearing individually in the steam game manager. Dreamcast, Gamecube etc show each game individually, but stuff like Mega Drive, Neo Geo etc do not. I can access these games via emustation fine, but i dont get say a Mega Drive collection in my collections folder, but i do get Dreamcast and Gamecube.

 

2. PS2 wants a bios, i've got a bios but it tells me to click the tools menu and then the data drop down, clicking it does nothing however.

[Flub]

Emudeck 2.0 has released. If you've already got it installed just run the updater from desktop mode and it'll switch into the new GUI installer

[Gotters]

11 minutes ago, Flub said:

Emudeck 2.0 has released. If you've already got it installed just run the updater from desktop mode and it'll switch into the new GUI installer

i’ll be cautious and wait for reports as at present mine is behaving itself and looks a big update

 

 

[Flub]

Full install guide is out

 

 

[bplus]

On 10/10/2022 at 12:04, Zio said:

I've got a few Xbox games on my Steam Deck (Jet Set Radio Future, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb and Panzer Dragoon Orta) - all three are ".xiso.iso" format. I'm sure you should be able to find these in a certain online Archive maintained by some kind of Org.

 

I will warn you - xemu is a bit slow on the deck, although performance has improved a fair bit lately. All 3 games I have are certainly playable, but there's some fair old slowdown in places.

Off topic, but does xemu work on Windows PCs? Last time I tried of Xbox emulation it was a nightmare and I gave up!

[Superunknown]

1 hour ago, bplus said:

Off topic, but does xemu work on Windows PCs? Last time I tried of Xbox emulation it was a nightmare and I gave up!

Cxbx reloaded is probably a better bet now. It has good compatibility and runs stuff like jsrf well whereas xemu can’t.

[Gotters]

worth keeping an eye on this thread for issues/tips people observing from updating Emudeck to the big new version

 

looks like it will overwrite your custom settings in emulators unless you go into the custom install mode

 

 

[Paulando]

Thought I’d try EmuDeck again now it’s updated to v2.

 

The install process is much better, but yet again, more issues. I turned border art off in the setup, but Dreamcast still has them on, tried to turn them off in RetroArch, configs won’t save, so like before I’d need to unload the game, remember which core it was and load that, then change whichever settings I want from memory. Shite.

[Spleen]

Has anyone successfully installed the Xenia Xbox 360 emulator?

 

When I try from the tools section in EmuDeck it always says 'Something went wrong'. And that is it. 

 

Cheers. 

[AlexM]

I copied across the mlc from Cemu on the PC to the Deck, the games all appear within Cemu but Steam ROM Manager doesn’t detect them - am I doing it wrong?

 

Historically I’ve decrypted games with CDecrypt and installed them to Cemu.

 

[alex3d]

On 17/10/2022 at 09:00, Gotters said:

worth keeping an eye on this thread for issues/tips people observing from updating Emudeck to the big new version

 

looks like it will overwrite your custom settings in emulators unless you go into the custom install mode

 

 

Thanks. Do I just update it via Discover or does it need to be completely re-installed?

[Gotters]

5 minutes ago, alex3d said:

Thanks. Do I just update it via Discover or does it need to be completely re-installed?

 

there is an update emudeck button on the desktop if you have the previous version, this is what I've been resisting pressing all week as there are a few bug fixes out already and whilst some have super smooth updates some haven't, so I've been cautious for a bit.

[Gotters]

some more but fixes gone out for the big Emudeck 2 update from last week - my update finger is twitching more and more over that desktop button.

 

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/emudeck-update-2-0-4-even-more-bugfixes/

[Zio]

I've been running EmuDeck 2 since it came out and it's been fine.

 

I also must strongly recommend CoinOps Legends 3 for Steam Deck... although be warned it adds a repo to the Steam OS Desktop updater that it can't then access, so you get an error show up everytime you go into the updater. It doesn't change anything or mess anything up though - the error is basically telling you that CoinOps Legends itself can't update, but everything else is fine.

[Gotters]

updated to version 2 of Emudeck and appears OK on quick inspection

 

anybody messed about with the Power Tools plugin, I've seen recommended settings for Gamecube but how do they persist or get stored ? Is it saved per app, do they get lost when you close the app ? 

[Superunknown]

When I used it, PowerTools applied system-wide, you didn't configure it for individual apps. So for Gamecube I was disabling 5 cores, and then re-enabling them after using Dolphin. It still wasn't enough to get a locked 60 fps from F Zero GX.

[AlexM]

On 20/10/2022 at 15:13, AlexM said:

I copied across the mlc from Cemu on the PC to the Deck, the games all appear within Cemu but Steam ROM Manager doesn’t detect them - am I doing it wrong?

 

Historically I’ve decrypted games with CDecrypt and installed them to Cemu.

 

Solved this. 
 

Use Cemu title manager to compress and export games into the WUD format, save them in the ROMs directory. Titles are them picked up by Steam ROM manager. 
 

[Gotters]

Small tip I just found for Dreamcast games, mine were showing 2 entries for each game in the library, apparently the emulator picks up the cue & gdi file as 2 copies of the game, deleting the gdi files removed the duplicates after re-running ROM manager. 

[Paulando]

How is everyone finding PS2 after installing EmuDeck, and are there any extra tweaks I need? Tried a couple of games and the sound was scratchy, and it wasn’t particularly smooth.

[Gotters]

I know some games have issues, like Hot Shots Golf, and toggling the software rendering in the emu helps with that (hold START + dpad left to toggle)

 

I've found things mostly very playable, but not spent hours on anything and inspecting them that closely so far.

[Paulando]

9 minutes ago, Gotters said:

 

I know some games have issues, like Hot Shots Golf, and toggling the software rendering in the emu helps with that (hold START + dpad left to toggle)

 

Ahh that’s a good tip, thanks!

[Gotters]

most of the emu's have useful default hotkeys, I put the PS2 ones into a note on my phone

 

[Paulando]

3 hours ago, Gotters said:

most of the emu's have useful default hotkeys, I put the PS2 ones into a note on my phone

 

Lovely, thank you! And actually, I was trying it out and loading a state in a game, but was told the current emulator doesn’t support states.

 

Turns out it was set to the PCSX2 core in Retroarch, so switching to the standalone PCSX2 in EmulationStation has fixed the performance issues. Plays absolutely fine now, rendering 2x native resolution!

[Gotters]

I don't fully understand the technical difference here in playing a game direct from your steam library (as added by Emudeck rom manager) and starting up Emulationstation and loading the same game up direct.

 

I can see how to do both so it's not a how do I do it, it's more a question of why doing it another way would make something play better when using the same emulator (PCSX2 in this case)

[Siri]

On 05/11/2022 at 12:58, Gotters said:

I don't fully understand the technical difference here in playing a game direct from your steam library (as added by Emudeck rom manager) and starting up Emulationstation and loading the same game up direct.

 

I can see how to do both so it's not a how do I do it, it's more a question of why doing it another way would make something play better when using the same emulator (PCSX2 in this case)

 

If it's using the same emulator, there's no difference. There might be some ever so slight differences on performance if there's programs (namely Emulationstation) still in the background as they'll still use resources in the background, but it's not a massive concern with modern computers running anything up to around the PS2 era.

 

The real benefit of ES is stuffing a million ROM sets you'll never play behind it so it doesn't completely shit up your Steam library, or if there's a situation where one emulator works better for one game compared to another (which was the case early on with N64 and Saturn emulation).