Be Excellent To Each Other

Latter. Once she bought something it worked fine.

Thinking about it, they did change the way gifts worked recently, although closing the ability to get new people onto steam readily seems a bit backwards.

Hmm, that might be it then as I think all my mate's bought so far was through Humble Bundles which won't count towards that total presumably. Good shout.

I've picked up South Park: Stick of Truth, STALKER: Call of Prit-Stick and Dying Light.

Fucking hell, the Steam sale must've been successful this year as my games are currently downloading at a whopping 35KBps. I put all seven new games on to download at about six this evening and only two of them had completed by the time I finished Firewatch ten minutes ago.

ETA: Huh, I restarted the Steam client just to check and now stuff's coming down at the usual ~4MBps. Oh well.

This is pretty cool if it works:

https://store.steampowered.com/together

Play your couch co-op games online with people using your PC or streaming device.

It's a good idea, but PC couch co-op is pretty rare, isn't it?

Not according to that there list

I’ve got loads of couch co-op games on Steam. We’ve played them using my Steam Link before.

Have we?

How drunk was I?

I don’t think Steam existed last time you visited

I know you're exaggerating for effect because dayum...

Only five years out. I actually thought it was 2004 but that’s when everyone started using it properly.

Because HL2 came out and you had to use Steam to unlock it.

Yep!

I've got an ubuntu laptop sat on my desk. Idle hands being what they are, the devil made me install Steam on it.

Turns out I can stream all my Steam games from home to this here laptop on my desk at work. Isn't the future brilliant?

Hello,

I don’t know anything about Steam (what it is, I mean) and I’ve googled but I’m not quite sure what it does, but a friend has recommended me this:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/ ... 2599%25A5/

And I wondered if there was a way of working out which games were available on Switch. I think this is mostly for PC downloads, isn’t it? But some titles I think are also on Switch, but I can’t work out how to tell which are.

Steam is totally separate from the Switch store so the only way to find out which games are compatible is to go through them one by one on the Switch itself.

Ah, that’s a shame. I hoped there might be a handy site or similar that listed what platforms all games were on.

The Switch store is a bit painful to navigate, I feel, only being able to see a 6 or so games at once, and the way that a highlighted thumbnail instantly turns to video irritates me a bit.

That being said, I'm sure there are other lists available with a similar intent

eg https://www.nintendolife.com/guides/bes ... -on-switch .... although I'm not sure how wholesome the goose game [be a jerk to people] and Good job [smash things up] really are. They really are fun though, so I'd recommend.

I've succeeded in getting the non-Steam, PC version of OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast running on my Steam Deck, along with the Amiga version of Deluxe Galaga.

I'm now working on general emulation -- I've already got PSX and N64 emulation going, just looking at some Amiga emulation now. It seems to work OK, but is quite picky about the Kickstart ROMs it uses it seems.

Hnng.
Are you using Emudeck? That seems to be the recommended emulation setup tool (although I've not specifically looked at any Amiga stuff, so not sure how much of the legwork it does for you).

Yeah, have used EmuDeck to setup all the emulators — then it’s just a case of copying the Kickstart ROMs (and any other BIOSs, like the PS1 etc) into the folder, then the games themselves and running Steam Rom Manager to add the shortcuts to the Steam library (or you can just use EmulationStation a la the RetroPie)

EmuDeck does pretty much everything for you in terms of the setup, it’s pretty sweet.

The biggest problem I've seen with emulation on it is still anything with a keyboard as the on screen keyboard which works great within steamgames does not cope well with things outside of steam.

Emulation on stuff that just uses a controller runs pretty well and I'm surprised at (after the faff with shaders) how well PS3 runs on here

Some examples of console stuff is covered here :

Mate, that's a 3 hour video

Yeah , you know you don't need to watch it from the start all the way through you can just jump around

Neogeo Pocket : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=738
PS3 : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=4487
PS2 : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=5873
GameCube : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=6097
Dreamcast : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=6432
Jaguar : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=8417
PS1 : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=8599
Sega Saturn : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=9509
PSP : https://youtu.be/7TTHGajwgC8?t=10546

I'd probably still watch it.

I stand corrected, the PS3 section starts with over 5 minutes of him waiting for a game to load.

I just played some Super Mario Maker 2 on my SteamDeck, after spending approx. 3 hours in total getting various bits off my Switch to enable the emulation with Yuzu (and a decent chunk of that 3 hours was waiting for things to dump to the SD card etc.)

Quite amazing how versatile this thing is.

I know that this is like saying 'you should get a raspberry Pi' whenever emulation is mentioned, but couldn't you have just played it on your Switch for the same experience?

Well, yes

But now I have a handheld (for a particularly niche definition of ‘hand’) that can play pretty much anything I throw at it and utilise my stupidly large Steam library too

If it turns out it can run the Plex media player and cast to a TV then it’ll replace the iPad we use on travels too!

The slot for new reservations is now Oct-Dec 22, rather than just "after" October.

Steamdeck owners, which version did you go for? Any 64GBers regretting not going larger?

I went with the 64 , but updated the internal SSD to 1TB

64 with a big SD card is fine , however you *do* need to faff about a bit either creating symlinks to folders on the SD card or not putting a lot of stuff on the SD (and removing it) as the shader caches all stay on the internal card , before I did the symlink stuff I got to the point where there was not enough space on the internal card and I basically had nothing installed to that. After creating the links it was fine.

Upgrading is one thing I'd be a little cautious of , I'd watched lots of videos and knew exactly what to do but I still ended up with a stripped screw on the back (which i just brute forced out) and I picked up a replacement set of screws from Amazon the actual removing / replacing the drive itself was easy (just be careful) , the 1TB + my SD cards means I have plenty of space and lots of stuff installed but as the price of 2TB SSD's keep dropping who knows :-)

Thank you! For £100 more I might plump for the larger model with faster storage. My capacity for techno faff is limited

FYI Valve / Steam have just started selling refurbished units so if your not quite sure then thats a cheaper option to start off with (looks like 20% off the price)

https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-is-now- ... to-110-off

If you do take your steam deck apart, make sure you take the SD card out first!!

Yeah - I've seen plenty of posts of people who snapped theirs in half , as you need to put pressure on to remove the case you wont notice that your also putting that pressure on the SD card :-(

Ah brilliant, thank you. Now to sell it in to Mrs fop.

Actually while I think about it, I know you can cast from the deck to the TV. Can you do it with a separate controller or do you have to play with the deck itself. I ask because my son has sweaty hands but he wants to play steam games, but I'd rather he didn't use the steamdeck controller (his porous maws have already broken a switch)

We have a spare 512GB Deck that is more or less unused, with case and box, that we’re looking to sell. Not sure on price yet, but if you’re interested let me know

Seperate controller works fine (even just using the deck by itself you can pair and use a different controler to access virtually everything that you could from the buttons on the front)

Ooh nice. Let me know what you're thinking on price and I'll put in the groundwork with Mrs fop.

Brilliant, thank you zaphod

So two other things just on that :

1) You say 'cast to the TV' and just to confirm you can use a USB dock to get HDMI out , or if your monitor / device will use a USB-C cable as an input those work with the steamdeck (although i say USB-C here i think its thunderbolt?) to display on a TV or monitor
I use a Steadeck dock for the main screen but I also have a small USB-C dock that i have for my Macbook and I've used it for connecting the steamdeck up to TV's and monitors without an issue

2) Controllers can be wide and varied as it will take just about anything , when I first got my deck I used a Nintendo Switch wireless controller , I've also used a basic PC wireless gamepad , a Playstation Dualshock and I'm currently using an 8bitdo ultimate which works really well

This is the video that sold me on the 8bitdo :



These are often on offer at Amazon for around £30 - £35 and what I love about it is the docking station part , so its plugged in and charging , however when i lift it out of the cradle it turns itself on and sync's to the Steamdeck instantly so i just pick it up and can move the cursor and control the deck straight away
When I was using the Switch controller I had to re-pair it via the bluetooth settings almost every time which although not a big thing was a pain (also a pain when i put it down and came back i'd often had to re-pair it again before it would give me control again)

I like the look of that controller. And thank you for the additional detail on connecting to the screen, really useful. Thank you!

So a couple of things:

1) thank you Gaz for the steamdeck, it's in brilliant condition and I'm really enjoying it
2) red dead redemption 2 on the train!
3) anyone have any recommendations for places to get ROMs?
4) thanks for the controller recco, @zaphod79. It's really nice, so much so I was hoping it would pair with the switch, but that ain't happening. However, any idea how to map the deck's touchpad click to the pad? I'm struggling and Headlander needs it for me to level up my head.
5) it gets fantastically hot doesn't it? Could cook an egg on the back.

@zaphod79 sorry ignore point 4, I've worked it out

https://pleasuredome.github.io/pleasuredome/mame/

has MAME, romsets and bioses if it's arcade roms you're after.