It’s most of the reason I got a steam deck. Emulation on the go ftw.
Out of curiosity what is the most modern system you are able to emulate on a steam deck. I’ve dabbled in MAME and PSX before, but is there a decent PS3 one?
Depends a lot on the games and compatibility. As mentioned Switch is definitely emulateable and often runs great but it heavily depends on the title.
On the Playstation side, RPCS3 is the PS3 emulator, it’s great. There are some experimental PS4 emulators, but they aren’t ready yet.
On the Xbox side, Xenia works well as an Xbox 360 emulator; it’s not linux native though, but it might work well under wine. I’m not aware of Xbox One (or later) emulators.
On the Nintendo side, I would be surprised if a Nintendo game that couldn’t be emulated exists. Even Switch games run very well on day 1 of release.
Yeah, don’t take this guy face value. These systems don’t emulate excellently at all. It definitely emulates perfectly up to GameCube and PS2 though.
Sorry, I had responded but also missed the “Steam Deck” qualifier. To be clear, the poster you’re responding to is absolutely right in general terms, but performance will be an issue for 360 and probably PS3 on the Deck.
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It depends on the game. Dolphin seem to be struggling with movie tie-in Gamecube games still judging by some of their blog posts. There was some awful game called Haunted Mansion or similar that they couldn’t get working because playing it to find the bugs was such a chore.
I’ve got some PS2 games to run well, some don’t run well at all. Anything below that is great.
So what I’ve got is: NES, SNES, Genesis and Master System, PS1, PSP and then PS2 as a hit and miss.
I’ve not tried anything aside from those yet on the Steam Deck.
Edit: noticed I replied to the wrong person, but close enough, I’m not fixing it because I’m about to fall asle…
Would you be able to run AetherSX2 (android PS2 emulator) somehow on the deck to run ps2 games? That app runs a lot of then pretty well on Android phones.
For Deck, you’ll likely be using EmuDeck for your emulation setup, which will install PCSX2 for PS2 games.
You can see the other available EmuDeck emulators here: https://emudeck.github.io/frequently-asked-questions/steamos/#what-does-emudeck-install
Holy crap that is pretty much all the emulators in EmuDeck.
!List of Standalone Emulators installed by EmuDeck
Cemu (Wii U) Citra (3DS) Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii) DuckStation (Playstation 1) MAME (Arcade games and more) melonDS (Nintendo DS) (Standalone) mGBA (Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance) (Standalone) PCSX2 (Playstation 2) PPSSP (Playstation Portable) PrimeHack (Metroid Prime Trilogy) RetroArch (Retro Systems) List of RetroArch Cores Used by EmuDeck Rosalie's Mupen GUI (Nintendo 64) RPCS3 (Playstation 3) Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch) ScummVM (Point and Click Adventures) Vita3K (Playstation Vita) Yuzu (Nintendo Switch) Xemu (OG Xbox) Xenia (Xbox 360)If you do not see an emulator in the list above, it is likely installed as a Retroarch core.!<
A dude I work with just showed me PS3 emulation on the Steamdeck and it’s LUDICROUSLY good. I was shocked.
Only started getting good recently. PS3 is an especially difficult system to emulate.
You’re not wrong at all. I tried a few years ago on a high end machine with awful results. Now, thanks to incredible devs, even a lil Steamdeck can run tons of games better than an actual PS3.
I’ve been going through the Turbografx/PC Engine library, particularly shumps. Lots of stuff that gets overlooked from when Nintendo and Sega were dominating.
I literally just set up Project64 and SNES9X yesterday lol. Nice timing. I tried Higan, but couldn’t get it to run games and got tired of trying to fix it. 9X works well enough for me to get my nostalgia fix.
SNES all the way, but there were definitely some gems on SEGA and NES that held up over time.
I’ve always preferred genesis overall, but that’s what’s great about emulation, we can have all the great systems and entire room sets on an SD card
I’ve done plenty of SNES and NES emulation, haven’t done much on SEGA yet. Any suggestions for SEGA games that are worth trying?
Depends on what you’re looking for. Phantasy Star 4 is an excellent JRPG. Crusader of Centy/Soleil, Landstalker and Beyond Oasis are good Zelda-ish games. Gunstar Heroes and Contra Hard Corps are excellent run’n gun games.
Comix Zone is a cult classic and hard as fuck. Kid Chameleon is also worth trying, though do so with lots of patience. For beat’em up, Streets of Rage
An interesting side note: a lot of the games that are on the SNES and on the Mega Drive/Genesis are different mainly due to Nintendo contracts: “You won’t release the same game on competing platforms”. This led to several similar but different games, especially from Konami
PS: Also check out dreamcast games, it has the best version of Soul Reaver and Dead or Alive 2.
PPS: Shadowrun on the Genesis is VASTLY superior to the SNES game.
That is a good starting list, thank you. I will check those out.
I agree with the guy who said Gunstar Heros and Contra. Also for a crazy weird sidescroller with humor and good music try Earthworm Jim.
and don´t forget Neo Geo!
Mupen64 was another decent one. Project64 has always been my #1.
I got a steamdeck for my birthday and I’ve only put EmuDeck on it, they are working on a PC version, it’s an all in one package.
RetroArch is super popular and available across many systems, with a bunch of open source frontends for it. I have it on a Raspberry Pi, a Mac, an OG Oculus Quest, playing everything from MAME to PSX.
EmuDeck is basically an all in one installer for standalone emulators but also predominantly Retroarch and its cores / EmulationStation-DE.
I have it on my phone.
Emulating games is important but I would argue that preserving the games is moreso. If you have discs of old games lying around (I grabbed the original floppy disk version of Marathon by Bungie for less than 5 quid), please find out how to dump them into an ISO or some other archive. It’s important now more than ever as games tend towards digital distribution and old games are lost to time. The games don’t have to be good, they just need to be preserved.
I’d argue emulating games is more important to the preserve effort. Unless you have some extremely rare one of a kind prototype game (chances are you don’t) most games have already been dumped at the point. What’s important is these dumps continue to get shared. Emulation drives people to find these games and adds one more seeder to the community meaning the more obscure stuff won’t just be dependent on one person keeping the file alive.
I agree for the most part, however, unless someone had dumped the games in the first place, the emulation wouldn’t be possible. It’s important that people know how to dump their games because they might be sitting on games that haven’t been uploaded yet. I mainly use vimm.net to find ROMs and it tells you how complete the collections are and which games are missing.
Most “retro” games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don’t even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.
The pre-online era was “easier” - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job’s done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that “just want to play the game” only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There’s content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There’s patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you’re not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it’s been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator. You can emulate Demon’s Souls (PS3), but you’re not going to get the messages or phantasms from the original.
I lost all my Marathon disks but I do still have an original boxed copy of Halo for Mac OS on CD-ROM
Oh man, did you have the entire trilogy? I hope you can find them! CDs are incredibly easy to dump, you just need a disk drive and Linux has easy tools for copying the data into an iso file.
No they only made Halo 1 for Mac. I played Halo 2 on Windows XP with a hack that unlocked its dependency on having Vista.
I meant the Marathon trilogy. I’d be so keen to get the ROMs for the original floppy disks for 2 and Infinity.
Yeah I did have all of those. Don’t know where they went but it’s possible they are archived on the vast Internets as well
Start it at 11 minutes. Everything before that is just his opinions on why people don’t want to emulate games.
Not saying it’s a waste of time or anything, just if you already know the arguments then it’s unnecessary.
How about I just don’t even click on the article at all, because I’m not going to watch a video that could have been an article.
“Hey guys here’s my video about why you should watch me talk about using emulation to play classic console games, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel BYAAAEEE!”
People should quit wasting so much bandwidth and storage on useless videos.
So angry. See as you see fit my friend.
Don’t forget to check out rom hacks as well. There are so many creative people who have extended or redeveloped games into their own image. Some good ones that come to mind are Chrono Trigger: Prophet’s Guile and Super Mario 64: Last Impact.
Son, I’ve been doing it since 1998
Bleem!
I was thinking nesticle, but yeah
Thanks Shitman!
It took me way too long playing games to realize what the cursor was back in the day lmfao.
I had Atari 2600 Action Pack 2 for Windows 95, which I didn’t realize at the time was one of the earliest console emulators (though you could only play the games included in the pack).
Then 97-99 had this explosion of console and handheld emulation. Nesticle, SNES9X, No$GB. Remember No$ was a big deal because it could emulate the link cable between two instances for getting all the Pokemon across red and blue.
You can do some really cool stuff with emulation. I’m playing Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia (3DS) emulated at 4x native resolution with a HD texture pack at the moment, and it makes that game really enjoyable. 3DS games in general benefit a lot from increased resolution you can do while emulating.
Plus these things like widescreen on games that didn’t have it, cheat codes, 60fps patches, fan translations, increased resolution, mods (Luminescent Platinum is so cool). It’s just such a neat world on top of just playing older games that you can’t purchase legally or conveniently anymore.
Piracy is a moral imperative. I donate to these projects whenever I can.
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I have a Homebrew Wii that I got set up about 10 or so years ago. Homebrew Wii can run lots of stuff. With emulation, it plays any 2D Nintendo game really well. I haven’t tried N64 emulation on it yet, but I imagine it’s pretty good.
Then it has hardware support for the entire GameCube library.
Basically Homebrew Wii can play every Nintendo game up to its own generation.
Ship of Harkinian is an absolutely brilliant way to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have it up and running on my Steamdeck and it blows the EmuDeck/RetroArch version out of the water.
Woah, thank you for this tip! I haven’t heard about this project.
Good to see they have an AppImage now. Setting it up on Linux was a hassle when I last played it around a year and a half ago.
Can’t wait for the MM decomp and similar Ship project there. I’ve never played and and I’m holding out on that and all the great modern tweaks it brings over existing emulation.
Fuck any article that tells you what you SHOULD be doing.
Even worse, it’s a video
If you need a quickstart on emulation, I highly recommend Ludo. it’s a wonderful frontend that comes packaged with most emulators and just works without any fiddling.
Ludo is a retroarch spinoff that has sane defaults and a simpler interface.
Shout out to the PPSSPP folks, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of FFT WotL and Tactics Ogre on my android tablet.
I once spent a 2 week holiday playing an R-Type and Metal Slug game-athon using MAME.
10/10 would emulate again.
What’s the most modern you could emulate on an android phone (s23)?
And is retroarch the best bet?
I’ve been entertaining the idea of buying a cheap laptop to play with Linux after yesterday’s posts and the idea of being able to emulate some more modern stuff and maybe install steam is appealing.
Switch
Really?
I would’ve expected 3DS at most
3ds runs perfect, even at 2x or 3x resolution.
Switch will depend on your game a lot more.
I’ve been deep in the Android emulation rabbit hole for a while.
RetroArch is a great all-in-one solution, but it can be tricky to customize. For example, you can’t move on-screen controls through any sort of interface, but need to edit a configuration file to do so. It also won’t automatically adjust the controls to the game you’re playing - you would need to manually override the configuration to use an SNES overlay for SNES games. That said, the default “retropad” on-screen controls work fairly well for most consoles if you don’t feel like customizing all of them.
RetroArch is going to provide the most accurate emulation cores for basically everything up through the N64/Playstation. Is it the best? If you take a few minutes to learn how to customize it then definitely. In addition to being accurate, it has a great system for video shaders that work across all consoles.
Outside of that Dolphin is solid for GameCube/Wii. Yuzu is available for Switch but only some games will be playable.
