Steam deck for a TV party game emulation machine? - eviltoast

Hello all, I was hoping to pick up a machine for 1080p gaming on a TV primarily for playing couch party games on emulators (switch, ps3, wii, etc) and was wondering if the deck would be a good fit? I’ve heard before that there were some problems with docks but not sure if that’s been resolved. Any insight is appreciated

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzM
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    4 months ago

    Should work fine, although I found connecting 4 bluetooth controllers at once to the LCD deck didn’t always work reliably. The OLED model has a better wireless chip, so this shouldn’t be an issue. The OLED model also supports waking up when you turn on a controller, but this only works if the controller supports bluetooth low energy (BLE). Xbox controllers do, but if you’re using a different controller you’ll need to check if it supports it or not (if you want this feature).

    Dock’s have become much more reliable. The official dock is overly expensive imo, but it recently was updated to support CEC where the deck can turn the TV on and switch inputs to the Deck, which makes it a lot nicer for Docked play. I don’t know if any of the cheaper 3rd party docks support CEC yet.

    You mentioned switch emulation, but not all switch games run well. You’ll need to check on the specific games you want to play.

    When emulating, the Deck’s built in controls will usually default to player 1. You can rearrange the controller order in both the quick-access-menu (on the deck press the “. . .” button, on other controllers hold the “home” button and press A), and in the steam input menu.

    • OhYeah@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      4 months ago

      Didn’t know about the controller wake up or the CEC features so that’s cool to hear! And do you know if using a controller with a 2.4G dongle like some 8bitdo would be better for stability than a bluetooth controller?