The Steam Deck is a great device for playing emulated games on, there are a number of options for settings up emulators but I find the easiest to use is EmuDeck.
Installing EmuDeck
Once you’ve download EmuDeck click on the ‘EmuDeck.desktop’ file and it should ask you if you want to open or execute, if it does not right click on it and select Properties > Permissions and check ‘Is executable’ and press OK.
Once run Konsole will appear and begin installing, it will ask you if you want to install in easy or expert mode, I suggest choosing easy, it will then ask you if you want to install your game roms on internal storage or a SD card, I recommend the latter if you have a SD card.
It will then ask if you want to open the ROM manager, a shortcut will be placed on your desktop as well.
To add games go to /home/deck/Emulation/roms/ or for SD card /run/media/mmcblk0p1/Emulation/roms/, there is a directory for each system, place your ROMs in each one.
Once you are done run the ROM manager, open the preview tab and click ‘Generate app list’, wait until it’s finished then if you’re happy click ‘Save app list’, if you return to Steam game mode you should find your ROMs in the non-steam list ready to play.
If it has incorrectly detected a game wrong you may need to rename the ROM and repeat the process, this should not cause any problems with the game itself.
MS-DOS Games
The ROM manager doesn’t work for MS-DOS games, to deal with these run EmulationStation, shown as Emu Deck in non-steam games, if you placed your games under dos they should already be detected.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The shortcuts depend upon what emulator is being used, for a full list look here.
Lutris
While technically not an emulator sometimes you will want to play Windows games outside of Steam, adding a non-steam game doesn’t always work, to do this the easiest tool to use is Lutris which can also install games for you.
Lutris beta flatpak is now available, to install it do the following in konsole.
flatpak update --appstream
flatpak install --user flathub-beta net.lutris.Lutris//beta
flatpak install --user flathub org.gnome.Platform.Compat.i386 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.defaultYou can then run Lutris from the KDE Games menu, or add it to Steam, you will need to add a runner first to Lutris, do this in Preferences > Runners > Wine, at this time I’m using lutris-fshack-7.2, once a runner is installed to manually add a game click the add button at the top left, select ‘Add locally installed game’, enter a name and select the Wine runner, under game options set the executable and Wine prefix to a empty directory, the prefix is where the game configuration and virtual filesystem is stored.
You can now right click a game and select ‘Create steam shortcut’ to add it to Steam, all being well it should just work, however this is not always the case, you may need to use Winetricks to install additional components, the Wine Application Database is a good place to start.
Common Problems
Some of the most common problems are:
| Game not detected | Most ROMS cannot be placed in sub-directories. |
| Wrong game detected | Rename ROM or directory. |
| Choppy performance / audio | Set the FPS limit to 60. |
| No game audio (MS-DOS) | Run the game installer and set the audio to soundblaster |
| Game runs too fast / slow (MS-DOS) | Press CTRL+F11 / CTRL+F12 to adjust speed. |
| Yuzu keys not loading | Try place in /home/deck/.var/app/org.yuzu_emu.yuzu/data/yuzu/keys/ |