Steam Deck

[Harrison]

I tested a few more games out this evening and tried a few older titles to see how they handle.

Skyrim is now nearly 10 years old so it's hardware requirements are not so high by today's standards. Steam shows it as playable with issues. I played it for over an hour and had no problems. And running the game on ultra graphics settings it held solid at 60fps and looked very nice. The controls map nicely to the Deck's controls and it played really well. No issues and I might actually play through the whole game again on it.

I know Skyrim is not quite a few years old. But for me it's still a bit mind blowing to see a game that only a few years ago was a showcase game pushing systems and GPUs to there limit. And now a handheld system costing less then a cheap PC build can run the game perfectly on high settings with no issues. And more impressive is the fact such games were never designed or intended to work like this. And thr fact this is running a 9+ year old Windows game in Linux using an abstraction layer.

It has got me thinking. Steam OS is now reaching a maturity, with so much work Valve are devoting to it, with the success of the Steam Deck helping to quickly bug fix and improve it, and the speed and level of support and development it's currently being seen. There are only a few areas of Steam OS that still need a bit of work. The knscreen keyboard being the Meon one that still needs a few tweaks. But in the whole in game mode Steam OS doesn't need any real experience of computers. You can literally install and play PC games exactly as you would on a Playstation. Therfore Valve could attempt another console in the future with a seperate controller to play Windows games as a console in your TV just like an Xbox or PS5. The issue when they tried it originally was the OS. The first versions of Steam OS were just a Linux OS with a Linux copy of Steam, and it could only run native Kinux games. So very limiting and a bit pointless. But that led to where we are now. Steam OS seemlessly running Windows games like a console. That would work as a console, not just as a handheld. If they used the same hardware as the Deck they could produce thrm even cheaper. Say the £299 price point.

I also think the real success of the Steam Deck and Steam OS is also the fact it's not running Windows. Windows is so bloated and resource heavy because it has to be so compatible for such a range of hardware setups. Steam OS on the Steam Deck basically makes it a fixed platform just like a console. They can develop the OS knowing all hardware is identical, so can optimise it knowing every device will function and perform the same. They can just concentrate on getting games working.

[Harrison]

https://www.emudeck.com/

This is such a polished Emulation solution for the Steamdeck. With all the features of Emulation Station built in to manage your roms, including scraping box art, bezels and game info you can manage the rom set you add on the Steam Deck itself easily, but you can also mirror an existing EmulationStation setup you already have onto the system too.

You can also pick for EmuDeck to use the Steam library itself to manage your roms, or use EmulationStation and just launch it from the Steam Library.

[Harrison]

Not tried it yet, but you can even install the Epic library and the GOG Galaxy library launcher applications on the Steam Deck and launch them from within Steam.

I've not tried it yet because it involves a bit of fiddling and you need a keyboard and mouse to do it easily, so I will be doing this next week once the holidays are over.

Here's a video showing the process of installing both launchers:

https://youtu.be/jaHRKdr1owc

The Syram Deck just keeps being better and better. Just bring able to install non Steam Windows applications, and thanks to the magic of Proton they just work. Mad.

[Harrison]

This is getting mad now. I've just found some tutorials on getting Playstation Plus Premium cloud streaming working on the Steam Deck. I've not tried it but I'm going to be seeing if I can get it working over the weekend. And tgere are some other tutorials on getting remote play working, so I could access my PS5 or PS4 and remote play them on the Deck. But the cloud game streaming (similar to Gamepass streaming) is the more interesting to me, because it offers a lot of PS3 games, a well a quite a few PS2 and PS1.

[J T]

Crikey, I only just realised that PS games were available on PC through that service. Wowzers.

[Harrison]

Yes. You need a real Playstation 4 or 5 controller connected via Bluetooth or usb to play them on PC, but it works well if your broadband is good enough.

Before recently you needed the PS Now subscription to access Playstation cloud gaming. Now they have combined PS Plus and Now together and the top tier Plus Premium has cloud streaming included. Works really well for PS3 games too. That's the only way to play those on a PS4 or 5 at the moment too.

[J T]

Getting a joypad is easy.

Is running this stuff taxing on the computer itself? I have pretty good broadband now but I don't have any modern computers (other than a work laptop)