7. Emulation¶
Under Construction
This section is actively being written, and I'm likely to go back and rewrite it here and there, so take everything here with a grain of salt for now.
While there are a lot of emulation options on the Steam Deck, the two easiest and best-developed ones at this point are EmuDeck and RetroDeck.
Both of these are intended to be All-In-One solutions to retro gaming and emulation on the Steam Deck, but they have considerably different approaches that you should be aware of before you decide which one to go with:
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EmuDeck is meant to be more for power-users. It's easy enough to set up, but there is a learning curve as it uses its own terminology a lot. It also leaves a lot of stray files and folders everywhere that I personally hate, and is more like "a collection of scripts tied together to manage a ROM library and set of emulators on the Steam Deck" than a really unified concept. However, the benefit and appeal of EmuDeck is that it gets regular updates, it ties in better to cross-platform syncing, and like I said, it exposes deeper config options than RetroDeck.
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RetroDeck, on the other hand, is easier and faster to set up, and since it's a flatpak, keeps everything confined to one place.
Removing EmuDeck
The other big mark against EmuDeck is that if you decide to uninstall it, it's going to leave traces behind that take a full factory reset to remove. I can't honestly say if NOT doing this can lead to problems, but from a Linux admin perspective, it's an extremely annoying thing to do.
Both of them integrate with the ES-DE (formerly EmulationStation) front-end, which gets added to your Game Mode and launched like any other non-Steam game.
Before You Start¶
Building Your ROM Library¶
The first thing you'll want to do is get some ROMs. The internet is FULL of sources for these.
(Need to add a list of links)
Sorting ROM Packs
I highly recommend that you do this either on an actual PC, or with a mouse and keyboard connected to your Deck in Desktop Mode.