I’ve been considering buying a Steam Deck but already having a decent PC I don’t know if it’s worth upgrading my PC or buying a Steam Deck.
I have a mid-range PC that runs any game nowadays, but I’m used to playing on console and I’m really more into programming and working on my PC, and what I like about the Steam Deck is that I just take it wherever I want to use it and I have everything ready to play, unlike a PC where for example, for emulated games I would need to look for a controller.
I guess I will buy the Steam Deck, but there are two things that concern me:
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How can I add pirated games to my Steam library? Honestly I’d be lazy to have to go into desktop mode every time I want to run a game. Is there a way to add it directly to my Steam library? I understand that Heroic (Epic Games and GOG Launcher for Linux) has an option to add the games automatically to the Steam Deck library, adding my pirated games there would add them to Steam or is there a similar method to do that?
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What is the emulation situation in the Steam Deck? I guess the Steam Deck is able to run almost any Switch game and some PS3 games, but I remember there was an emulator launcher specifically designed for the Steam Deck, does anyone know which one it is and if it is possible to open it directly from Steam?
You have several options to run any game, regardless of source, on the Deck directly from Steam. You can just add the exe to Steam and tell Steam to run it with Proton (the thing it needs to run Windows games). Or you can use a helper program like Heroic or Lutris and add the games from there.
Emulators work the same. Either you use a helper like EmuDeck to scan your library or you install the emulators yourself and add each game individually with the corresponding command line arguments. You can also use RetroArch, if you want your roms to be separate from the rest of your games.
Hmmm, I hadn’t thought about it but RetroArch is indeed a good idea, although some cores (like PCSX2) are old and run a little bit bad even on my PC, but I can still try it again. Thanks for the idea.