I have both and I think the OLED is a nice upgrade. I had some hardware issues (caused by me, lol) on the LCD so I had a reason to upgrade anyway, but it has enough upgrades over the original that I’d probably have done it regardless. Whether or not it’s worth it I’d say depends on your personal circumstances but if you’ve got the extra money and you wanna give your old one to your partner, having two Steam Decks would be really nice for playing games together imo.
Oh yeah, one other point about the OLED: retro-styled games with CRT filters look really good on it. Animal Well in particular is absolutely gorgeous.
Played with one at PAX last weekend and it was enough to push me over the line from ‘I probably want one of these’ to ‘yep, absolutely getting one’.
The way Steam does family sharing now is leagues ahead of Nintendo and Sony. I can see myself moving everything I would normally play on Switch to Steam Deck instead, with the added bonus of being able to easily share digital purchases with my partner as well.
This thread has been a delightful way to see the cool shit people are doing with the Deck, so thank you all for that!
I also always forget to use more context when speaking of Deck recs, due to variability in everyone’s use for it.
I only play mine in a home setting (I use my Vita and GBA for portable on-the-go gaming), mostly play older games, and rarely play anything for more than 2hrs straight anyway. So me not having battery life or ergonomic issues is relative to that use case.
For folks who want to play newer stuff or take it on the go, I can see myself not recommending getting one.
Despite loving playing primarily handheld mode with sports on in the background, I couldn’t deny the excitement of finally docking my Deck. Some games just feel better playing with a controller and TV. Plus I want to be able to play all my favorite multiplayer games with others. So I picked up a couple Dualshock 4s, the recommended Baseus 6-1 dock and now I’m jammin!
Feels extra cool having a handheld that doubles as a console, stocked with all these awesome games. It’s now a Switch, but better.
*Edited post with more pics from each system test and final set up. These are all currently on default display settings (except PS2, I’ve increased resolution and made it widescreen), so I look forward to tweaking those for each system/game to optimize the aesthetic.
Would love to know if these work steadily for you over the next little while. I was using DS4s via Bluetooth on my Deck for a while, but started running into problems with input lag. Quite a few moments where the signal would cut out, and then all my button presses would all happen at once when the controller reconnected.
I’ve tried looking into it and some people say it’s a Bluetooth issue, or an interference issue with some nearby 2.4GHz wifi. pretty annoying!
I’ve been playing a little bit of Natsu-Mon on my Steam Deck lately and I think this is the first game I’ve ever played where gyro controls worked out of the box. Was pretty surprised to see that. Performance is perfect too. Good game that could use some more attention imo.
I’ve been having those issues with the 2.4g controllers and keyboard/mouse I’ve used on the deck, but haven’t had any problems since switching to Xbox Series 2 Elite over Bluetooth. I assumed my wireless issues were due to interference from neighbors’ apartments, didn’t think this was something that could happen with Bluetooth too
No issues as of yet, but will report back if anything changes. So far so good though. Haven’t held a Dualshock 4 in a while and forgot how comfortable they are.
For those with large rom libraries, I’ve found using Emulation Station - DE with Emu Deck to be a way better experience than populating my rom collections in the actual Steam library itself.
Oooh I like that! I ended up turning the boot animations off partially because I was impatient and partially because I don’t like most of them. A GBA boot video would transport me straight back to the 00’s.
Oh gawd I’m in real trouble now since the fall sale has started and literally 75% of my wish listed games are on sale, many for under 5 bucks. This is going to suck for my backlog!
This is maybe a very silly question and it also may have a complicated answer, but do you know whether those saves are then “gettable” on a non-Steam retro arch instance?
I’m getting a steam deck and and the dream is to be able to sync saves between my PC, steam deck and Vita/3Ds instances of retroarch
Until your very post I didn’t even know it was possible to sync between PC and steam deck with them!!
There are a few ways to achieve that dream. The most common is with a service like DropBox or Google Drive to automatically sync. Even the Mister has a google drive upload/download script which has been handy for me.
If you wanted an easy way to check out the files, Steam makes it very easy to download cloud save data: [Sign In]
by default your retroarch saves will be in the /saves folder in the retroarch directory, so could copy and paste them across devices. syncing them with the non-steam vers, yeah, you could remap the save directory to a dropbox location or google drive location on your pc, but WanderWhist’s link, i had no idea about until now! very cool!
Ok folks: I think I’m going to take on the project of getting Saturn emulation working on my Deck this winter break. Is there a consensus (or thoughts in general) on what emulator works best for it? I can figure out the installation as needed, but I’m having difficulty parsing the internet’s extremely divided opinions on the matter and I’d rather know what folks here have had direct experience with.
I’ve only tried Beetle so far and it works just fine for almost all the games I’ve tried it with. So far the only game I can’t get to work is Pebble Beach Golf. So I still have some experimenting to do.
Will let ya know if and when I find a better option/settings.
