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Steam Deck Emulation Guide

This guide covers how to install emulators on a Steam Deck, setting up controls, playing games with optimal settings, and integrating them into Steam itself. It uses Steam ROM Manager, which automatically downloads cover art for each game and adds a shortcut to Steam. The end result will look like this, with Steam collections for each system:

This is an unofficial guide, not affiliated with Valve. To the best of my knowledge, it's not possible to mess up your Deck from this guide, but I'm not responsible if you do.

This guide does not cover getting ROMs or other copyrighted material.

Current Systems Supported

  • Nintendo Switch (Yuzu)
  • Wii U (CEMU)
  • Wii (Dolphin)
  • GameCube (Dolphin)
  • Nintendo 64 (m64p)
  • SNES (Snes9x)
  • NES (FCEUX)
  • PlayStation 3 (RPCS3)
  • PlayStation 2 (PCSX2)
  • PlayStation (DuckStation)
  • Xbox (Xemu)
  • 3DS (Citra)
  • DS (melonDS)
  • GBA (mGBA)
  • PSP (PPSSPP)
  • PC Engine (CD) / TurboGrafx-16 (-CD) / SuperGrafx (Mednaffe)

Open a GitHub issue if you want support for a different system.

Storage

This guide assumes your ROMs are under ~/roms (a folder in your home directory), with a file structure like this:

roms
├── switch
├── wiiu
├── wii
├── gamecube
├── n64
├── snes
├── pce
├── ps2
└── nes

If you store your roms on an SD card, substitute ~/roms with /run/media/Deck/roms in the guide. You'll have to give Flatpaks access to your SD card - open up a terminal and run

flatpak override <name> --filesystem=/run/media/

Substitute <name> with the flatpak's name, this should be apparent in the guide. For example, Snes9x's flatpak name is com.snes9x.Snes9x, so you'd run

flatpak override com.snes9x.Snes9x --filesystem=/run/media/

Getting Started

To start off, switch to Desktop mode by pressing the Steam button, navigating to Power, then Switch to Desktop.

Go to Steam ROM Manager's latest release, then download the file ending in .AppImage that DOES NOT contain i386. It should be named something like Steam-ROM-Manager-2.3.29.AppImage.

Open SteamOS' file manager Dolphin (it's different from the emulator Dolphin), then navigate to wherever you saved the file, probably in Downloads. You can run it by just double-tapping the file.

From here, the guide branches off for each system you want to emulate:

❓ Support

If you have any trouble with the guide, feel free to open a GitHub discussion or visit the #emulation channel on the Steam Deck Discord.

📜 License

Copyright © 2022 Nicholas Christopher

Unless otherwise stated, this guide is licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0.