Where to start?? Steam Deck

[nWo]

Hi guys. I finally got a Steam Deck. It is still on its box, arrived today.

I wanted to ask you, where is the best place to start? I want to hack / mod it to run emulators, etc. But to be honest I have no clue whatsoever on how to do anything yet with it, besides the official use.

So I would be very grateful if you point me in the right direction. It has 65 gb of memory and I have a 512 gb micro SD card.

Thank you very much in advance!!!

 

[Taleweaver]

The best way to start would be how to use it as intended: familiarize yourself with how to install and play steam games, rebind some controls, update it and so on. I've found quite a bit of 'tips and tricks on what do do when you get your steam deck' on YouTube, but the main one i use is the requested fps: instead of 60, 40 is better (battery wise) with a lowered... I forgot the name of the setting. In either way: it really helped on battery drainage.

Protondb.com is an interesting site in that it maintains a database on which games are(properly) playable. It's more reliable than valve's own rating system.

The deck is pretty much a pc with a nice front end. You don't hack it any more than a windows pc. Just press 'go to desktop mode' to go there. It runs Linux, but by now it has plenty of ways to use it with hardly needing windows skills.
For emulation, google "emudeck" (oh, and Google "hero launcher" as well if you have gog.com and/or an epic games account you want to use). It's almost down to one simple install interface to download, install and configure most if not all emulators for it. You have to provide the roms and a firmware here and there, but otherwise it's smooth sailing. It even grabs images to use as covers and puts the games in steam groups for you (meaning: you'll find your roms in gaming mode between your steam library).

You might also want to Google decky loader. It's... Kind of like the homebrew channel, but free. By itself it just provides an easy way to install plugins. But there are some fun ones there.

Installing non steam games... My method's a bit clunky, but perhaps the previous option offers a better way (not yet checked).

 

[khuong]

Hi guys. I finally got a Steam Deck. It is still on its box, arrived today.

I wanted to ask you, where is the best place to start? I want to hack / mod it to run emulators, etc. But to be honest I have no clue whatsoever on how to do anything yet with it, besides the official use.

So I would be very grateful if you point me in the right direction. It has 65 gb of memory and I have a 512 gb micro SD card.

Thank you very much in advance!!!

No "hacking" required..

Update your Deck.. using the OS..

If you just want easy pz emulator stuff with very little hassle..

https://www.emudeck.com/ < go there, there's a guide to install the script in Desktop Mode, it'll run through everything you need to get majority of the EMulators, set up paths for you to copy your legal roms too.. etc etc.

If you want to get further and more advanced..

There's a few linux proton guis that help you install Non Steam/Window games, and allow it to run on Linux/SteamOS... alot easier..

https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch

Lutris / Bottles / etc... just youtube the tutorials, and you're good to go..

 

[Perisys1312]

As others have said in the forum, emudeck. But also...

Protip, run your emulation stuff on a seperate SD card, it frees internal storage and makes rom transferring much easier. (Turn off the deck, take the card out, put it in PC, etc.)