Good Morning Folks! On Tuesday night I started a brand new character and last night I got it into maps. This has been one of the faster leveling characters I have played, but that was in part because for most of it I was using a bunch of uniques to speed up the process. As I talked about yesterday, I created a Necromancer and started working towards a Vaal Absolution build. Last night I did my normal build testing routine of running a T1 map, a T5 map, a T6 map, a T10 map… and then ultimately trying a T16 map. Shockingly I survived very well in a T16 “alch and go” Crimson Temple with red altars turned on. Did it feel amazing? Absolutely not, but it does feel pretty solid when I drop back down to T10 “barely red” maps. I think more than anything I just need more levels to make this build feel a bit more comfortable as I just dinged 76 this morning.
I am sure I will do a full write-up at some point, and I recorded a brief video this morning of how it looks currently. Essentially you can see my POB from level 73 and just starting maps, and I am making a few “choices” that differ from the standard spiel. Most of it is stuff I had lying around like using a +2 Minion Geofri’s Crest just because it had a boost to minions and really good resistances on it rather than its actual purpose of scaling up Holy Relics. I am still not entirely certain what I think of this build but in the grand scheme of things it seems to be pretty solid. I think it falls in the category of so many of my alternate builds where if I put more time into it, it could feel amazing. More than anything this was a test case to feel how absolution plays, and I think I have gotten a decent idea at this point.
I also wrapped up the second book in the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson and plan on starting the third book tonight. This novel was a wild ride, and I realize I have said that before… but no really… this was a wild ride. It went in a bunch of directions and wound up with a very “Empire Strikes Back” type ending where everything is bad for our protagonists. However, that makes a lot of sense given this is the middle book in a trilogy. I just did not expect the direction things went, many of the actions that were taken, or the resolution that came out of them. I am still very deeply invested in most of the main characters so of course I will hungrily begin consuming the next bit as soon as things have settled down tonight.
Lastly, my order for the Gamecube Purple Nitro Deck came in yesterday and I had a bit to play with it. Essentially it is a controller dock of a sort for the Switch where you take the central tablet portion and click it securely into a wrap-around controller base. The end result is something that feels significantly more solid and balanced in your hands than the default configuration of a Switch. It features rumble and gyro with the only lost functionality being NFC but given I rarely if ever use Amiibos… this was not a big deal to me. The buttons and dpad are maybe not as high quality as I would have liked, but the thumb sticks are Hall Effect which should stop drift. There is an added benefit of having four buttons on the back in a similar arrangement to the Steam Deck. The entire package is a bit lighter than the Switch with native Joycons attached. All in all I think I am going to like it quite a bit.
While I was writing this post, the video of Vaal Absolution gameplay finished uploading, so check that out if you are interested. Today is my Friday, so quite honestly I have no clue if I will be making a blog post tomorrow. If I do not… I hope you all have a wonderful day. We are going to get our Flu Shot and latest Covid booster so I have no clue how I will be feeling in the morning.
Something that has been floating around the social networks this week is the Steam Replay. I do not remember this existing in past years, so it seems like this is something brand new for Steam and they appear to be taking a page from Spotify which has a similar practice. If you are curious you can look at my full replay here, but this morning I figured I would talk about it a bit. I do my own tracking thing that I am currently working on, but I do appreciate Steam handing me so much information on a platter. I tend to devote a certain amount of time in the last few posts of the year to reviewing the year as a whole and this flows right into that pattern. Steam creates a number of handy infographics ready for you to download and share on social media. The above image is “formatted for Twitter” but they also have a square format for Instagram if that is more your thing.
The first tidbit that I find interesting is just how high my session count is. I think this can be accounted for by two different behaviors that happen to me a lot. Firstly I often get into a game and then something comes up… cat knocks something over… wife needs my help… and I have to bail out of the game quickly. This is entirely why I bounced off Deathloop because that game refuses to let me save out quickly and return just as quickly to what I was doing. After failing to complete a stage three times because I kept getting interrupted I uninstalled the game and move on with my life. The other part of this is that I boot up a lot of games… and then do nothing with them. Sometimes I suffer from the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome where I have so many games but nothing quite sounds right. So before I settle in on something and hyper-focus for several days, I will often flail about trying to find the “right” game to play.
The thing that honestly shocks me with this one is the number of achievements. I realize in January and February I did burn through like twelve games in rapid fire, and honestly, that is probably why that number is so high. That is not exactly my normal pattern because in general, I do not give a fuck about achievements. I say that… but I am now going after a truly stupid achievement in Path of Exile that involves me playing a character up to Hillock and then logging out, and coming back and trying it again after the map resets all for the purpose of attempting to get a unique drop in that first map. I am not shocked that I spent most of my time playing either New World or Path of Exile because those really were the games of “this” year for me. Witcher 3 is so high because I poured into doing as close to 100% of the content run as I could when I was doing my “play everything to completion” thing at the start of the year.
I knew I was somewhat “out of band” in the sheer number of games I play in a given year… but I did not realize I was that far off. If I take this statement as evidence of how most people consume games, it would make me believe that the average gamer just plays a handful of games. The streak is interesting because I am almost certain that is New World, and it in truth should be longer because Steam tracks the Live client and the PTR client as separate games. There was a period of time when I was playing the PTR client every single day, and then when Brimstone Sands launched I switched over to playing Live again. The achievement count again I am certain is because in Dec/Jan/Feb I burned through a lot of single-player games.
This graphic shows how my gameplay stacks up as compared to new releases, recent releases, and what it calls a classic game… aka anything that is more than eight years old. I am sure some folks would bicker about the definition of “classic games” there, but I guess for me it makes sense. I do spend a lot of time jumping on the bandwagon of a brand-new game as it launches, but apparently only about a third of my gameplay is spent in that manner. I would have thought it was higher, to be honest. It does make sense that the bulk of my time is spent on games that release in the last few years because I often miss the launch and eventually get around to checking out the game a few years later. I think this is a side effect of how hyper-focused I can get on a single game and how I mostly push everything else aside when I am in that mode. Then there are just so damned many games coming out each year that it takes me a while to digest that they came out and get around to playing them.
This one confuses me quite a bit. Usually, when I see a graph like this, it denotes something like quadrants that are universal for everyone. This is clearly chosen from the games that I actually played during the year because no one would lay out a personality matrix based on these traits. It makes a lot of sense that MMORPG, Looter Shooter, and Medieval are so high on the list. That little corner seems to be my sweet spot. What I am shocked about is how high the Souls-like games are showing up on the list, but I guess that makes sense as well because I keep trying them… and then bouncing off them. Cyberpunk would be a much larger segment if I actually had bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. I own it on GOG instead which means none of my playtimes is getting logged here. Dark Comedy though… no clue where that one is coming from because while yes I do love that genre I am not sure which games that I played this last year are contributing to that.
I am still working on my larger “Grand Experiment” post that I make each year, in which I have been tracking monthly play patterns since 2012. I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the things on my Steam Replay this year in the meantime. Valve has this bad habit of starting things and not necessarily carrying through with them, but I am hoping that this becomes a yearly tradition. I personally find evaluating my habits interesting, and it has been really cool to see some of the Replays of my friends. What are your thoughts? Did you enjoy the Steam Replay as a concept? Feel free to drop me a line below. I am not exactly sure WHEN I will make my big post, but given the trajectory, it is likely on Friday.
Good Morning Friends! I have to admit I have slowed down a bit on my whole “Steam Deck Nonsense” largely because I will not get my upgraded storage until early October. After reviewing my options I decided to go with an OEM drive originally designed for the Microsoft Surface, but provides 1TB of storage and fits the 2230 single-sided form factor required by the Steam Deck. This seemed to provide the most bang for the buck as 2TB drives are a wee bit out of my price range for the moment sitting around $600. Over time it is a certainty that the price will go down, but 1TB appears to be the largest reasonable option for the 2230 form factor. If you ONLY care about parity with the highest stock Steam Deck unit… you can pick up the 512GB for around $20.
So let’s play a game and talk about the total cost of what my unit is going to ultimately be versus the highest stock model. We know that the premium version comes with a special anti-glare screen treatment and 512 GB of internal storage. My unit will have 1TB of internal storage, so roughly twice the space but for sake of this experiment we are only going to see if my upgraded version could beat the price of the stock premium version. Let’s add up the components that I have added or will be adding to my unit.
Base 64GB eMMC Steam Deck – $399.00
WD PC SN530 M.2 2230 SSD 1TB NVMe – $134.60
Anti-Glare Screen Protector – $3.33 ($9.99 in a 3 pack)
So my finished unit is going to be $536.93 and will have a similar anti-glare screen with the benefit of it being a screen protector and having twice the internal storage and still come in $112.07 cheaper than the deluxe model. If you add in the 512 GB SD card I am also using with the unit, and the 20,000mAh power bank that I am using with the unit, you end up around price parity. However, you end up with a package that allows me to recharge the Steam Deck three times and have three times the storage capacity. Basically, I still think it is well worth the investment of time, to go with that base model and upgrade yourself and the pricing for storage will only get cheaper over time.
Installing Decky and Power Tools
Like I said before, I have slowed down configuring items on the Steam Deck that require a novel application of my time. My theory is that I should be able to clone my existing hard drive onto the much larger 1TB model when it comes in, but in case that fails… I don’t want to get too deep into the woods that it will be a challenge to bring my unit back up to where I am currently. If I have to wipe and start from scratch, I have a relatively minimal investment timewise currently. There is one thing however that I have been using quite a bit and have not really talked about and that is Power Tools. Essentially Decky is a plugin manager, and Power Tools is the default plugin that installs which allows you to modify various system settings on a game-by-game basis. This is terribly useful especially when it comes to emulation because it seems if you throttle the total core count it increases the speed that each individual core runs at.
Unlike most mods we might add to the Steam Deck, we are actually going to begin in Game Mode. The first step is that we need to go into Settings and the System menu and enable Developer Mode. Be very careful when you are in this menu because Format SD Card is located precariously below the option we need to toggle on shown in the screenshot above. Enabling Developer Mode is different from say unlocking your file system, and is a relatively safe operation.
Once enabled, you will now have a new option in the settings menu all the way at the bottom labeled Developer. In this screen, you are going to specifically toggle on something labeled “CEF Remote Debugging”. This is what allows Decky to install plugins from the storefront. Incidentally, while you are in this menu, you might also want to untick “Enable Wifi Power Management” because one of the problems with the Steam Deck is that in order to save battery life, it often drastically reduces WiFi transmit strength.
Next up we need to actually install Decky. In order to install this, we are going to need our old friend the console app, which means you will need to boot into Desktop Mode. As always you will have needed to set a password with the “passwd” command that I covered in a previous article. Next up we are going to get the install command for Decky from the project GitHub page. You are going to paste the following command into Konsole:
curl -L https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader/raw/main/dist/install_prerelease.sh | sh
This will install Decky to your steam deck. You will be prompted to enter the password that you set previously with the passwd command. Once everything finishes, reboot your device which will load into Game Mode by default. You have to reboot in order for the plugin to take effect, so simply returning to Game Mode is not sufficient.
If everything went as expected, you should see a new menu icon at the bottom of the menu when you click the “…” button. This will be where all Decky plugins can be located, and by default, you will have a single plugin loaded called PowerTools.
At the top of this menu on the right hand side next to the name Decky, you will now also have a storefront page that allows you to browse and install plugins. The storefront will allow you to install an addon or select a previous version if for some reason something is not supported in the most current version. I’ve never had to do this and for the most part, just install the latest version of everything. I guess let’s talk a bit about the plugins that I personally find useful.
vibrantDeck
VibrantDeck is essentially a very rudimentary version of a tool like ReShade for the Steam Deck. You can configure it globally like I have, just to increase the color saturation a bit, or enable per-game profiles for more granular control. While you can’t do some of the crazy screen effects like you can with ReShade, you can steak the settings to make the Steam Deck image a little more pleasing to your preferences. I personally feel like by default the Steam Deck is a little bit desaturated, and this can resolve that easily.
CSS Loader
CSS Loader essentially allows you to style the theme elements of the Deck as well as configure various visual tweaks. For example, if you scroll back up to the first image in this post, you will notice that all of my Deck icons have a slightly rounded edge to them. I achieved this by installing the Round theme element which allows you to control the curve intensity on most images. I also have one that similarly applies a rounded effect to the virtual keyboard that overrides my existing rainbow keyboard theme. There are a bunch of themes that folks have created that do various things, so it is well worth spending some time browsing. I personally landed on Obsidian because it is essentially the default theme of the Steam Deck with the ability to change the background colors.
DeckFAQs
This one is admittedly a bit frivolous, but I come from an era when GameFAQs mattered. This essentially gives you rapid access to text-based game guides from within steam. By default, it will take whatever game you are playing as the search parameter, but you can also submit your own queries. Ultimately if you click through to a guide it will load the full text-based guide in an overlay window on the deck. Admittedly you could do ALL of this on your phone, and would probably have a better experience but I mostly installed the plugin for nostalgia sake and for those rare times when I am playing something that I want a walkthrough on like FFV for tidbits of information I might not remember when doing a playthrough.
ProtonDB Badges
This one is pretty straightforward, but it allows you to apply the compatibility information to your hover-over effect on Steam games. This will tell you quickly if a game is fully compatible, works with issues, or is not supported at all. Steam maintains a list of games that are completely verified to work with the Deck, but often times most of your library has some support that might require something as simple as occasionally doing mouse input with the trackpad. What you really care about however is how well the game might run, and there is an external resource called ProtonDB that does this.
If you look at 7 Days to Die in your library you see the standard information icon, that you can click through and get additional information.
If you click through to the game profile, you can now see a ProtonDB badge in the top left corner of the profile indicating that the game has been platinum certified to run under proton.
If you want even MORE information, you can click on the badge and it will bring up the full game profile on ProtonDB. In this case for example it shows that 7 Days to Die not only runs under Proton, but it actually natively supports Linux, so the game should run excellently.
The Steam Deck continues to be a phenomenal piece of hardware that walks that line between ease of use and enthusiast shenanigans. Like I said I am mostly in a holding pattern as I wait for storage before I go too much deeper down this rabbit hole. Probably my next wave of modifications will be to get specific games working on the deck. I want to try and get Final Fantasy XIV, GW2, and World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha running. All of those will require a specific brand of nonsense that I do not relish doing a second time if my clone disk idea does not work as intended.
Good morning friends! Friday and throughout the weekend I attempted to mark another thing off my Steam Deck ToDo list. This morning I am going to do a half-assed job of walking you through how I got a sizeable number of emulators up and running on my device. Essentially I am leaning heavily upon something called EmuDeck, which is less an emulator and more a series of scripts that configure emulators for you, and install what you need to add all of the individual games to steam. If things go successfully you end up with something similar to the above screenshot, with beautiful images representing each game and the ability to launch them directly from steam while in game mode. I am going to attempt to walk you through the logical order of getting things set up.
Installing EmuDeck
The first thing that you need to do is download EmuDeck. This is going to work much better if you launch your web browser of choice while in Desktop Mode on your steam deck. Visit https://www.emudeck.com/ and click on the download menu option, then the download app button. This will drop an executable package in your download folder by default.
Open up the Dolphin file browser and browse to your download directory. Before you can do anything you are going to need to open up properties on the item that just downloaded and click over to the permissions tab and make sure “Is Executable” is checked. Once you have done this double-click the file and this should begin the install process for EmuDeck.
I am not going to walk you through the entire setup process for EmuDeck, there are other guides out there like the above video that do a much better job of this. Essentially there are two choices that matter, the first is if you want to do the Easy setup or the Expert setup. The Easy setup will have very minimal options and largely just configure everything for you. It will however skip a few things that might be useful, like a drive for gyro controls that you can use with the switch/wiiu emulators. The expert mode will require keyboard input however so make sure you are at minimum remoting into your deck through the steam link like that I talked about last week. The other major choice will be if you want to install it to your local storage or an SD card. I chose the latter for reasons I will get into later, there can be significant problems if you fill up your internal storage.
Enabling SFTP for File Transfer
In theory, EmuDeck just installed a slew of folders and emulators on your device, but next, you are going to have to transfer some ROM files before you can make any meaningful progress. I am not going to tell you how to acquire ROM files, other than to say that you should dump your own ROMs for legal reasons. In order to get the files over to your deck, we are going to need some reliable method of transfer. I looked into a large number of options, but given that the Steam deck is just a Linux device, the most straightforward seems to be enabling SSH and then using SFTP. If you are following along my journey you should have set a password for your device. If you have not done that yet, please refer back to my previous article. Type the following command into Konsole:
sudo systemctl enable sshd
This will prompt you to enter the password for your account, and when you do so it will enable the SSH daemon to start on boot. However, in order to get this running the first time, you will need to restart your steam deck and we have one step to check while we are in Game Mode, so don’t go right back into Desktop Mode quite yet.
You should know your password, but we need to verify while in game mode what your console hostname is set to. The default for this is “steamdeck” but in theory, while you were configuring other options you might have changed this not understanding what it is used for. To check what your hostname is go to settings > system and scroll down until you find an argument called hostname. You can see in the above screenshot that mine is still set to the default which is “steamdeck”.
Next, you are going to need an SFTP client, and this is entirely your choice. There are many options, but I just happened to have Filezilla because I have been using it for decades. Ultimately in order to connect to your Steam Deck you need the following information:
Host – you should have just seen that in the previous step
Port – you should be able to leave this blank, but if your client requires this set enter port 22.
User – you should enter “deck” for your username.
Password – the system password that you configured previously in Konsole.
If this works you should be connected to the filesystem of your steam deck remotely. By default, you will be in the /home/deck/ directory, but you should be able to change this to wherever you need to go. If you chose to install EmuDeck to your SD Card and formatted your SD Card in the steam deck… you should be able to reach those files from the following path:
/run/media/mmcblk0p1
If you chose to install EmuDeck to your local storage, then the path for you should be the following:
/home/deck/emudeck/backend
In theory, you are going to be spending all of your time in either /roms or /bios and in the ROMs directory EmuDeck will have stubbed out the correct folder structure for each system. Copy your legally obtained ROM files into these directories and we can proceed with the next steps. If you are using the internal storage of your device, please be careful not to copy too much data during this process. Keep a close eye on the storage limits for your device. If you fill the internal storage and the system does not have enough room to write temporary files, it will appear bricked and go into a bootup loop. I will talk a bit about that later, this is fixable.
Configuring your Games
Boot back into Desktop Mode, and EmuDeck should have dropped a shortcut to something called the Steam Rom Manager onto your desktop. For this step, I had to find a screenshot from the internet because running the Rom Manager will disconnect Steam LInk. You will need to complete this step on the physical hardware or through some sort of port replicator that doesn’t rely on Steam Link. Essentially you want to click the Preview tab in the sidebar, then click the Generate App List button that appears at the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, there will be a countdown of sorts for “Remaining Providers” once this reaches zero you can click the “Save App List” button at the bottom and every game that the Rom Manager has found will be registered with Steam as a new game.
At this point, I suggest you close the Rom Manager and open Steam while in desktop mode on your device. This will re-enable Steam Link and allow you to connect back in remotely again, which is highly suggested for this next step. We are going to return to our old friend Boilr, that I talked about in the previous article. It is my experience that the results of what Steam Rom Manager files for images, is going to be very hit and miss. As a result, I used Boilr to plug any gaps that the Manager failed to find images for. This is going to be very time-consuming because each time you set an image and go back to the listing of games… it will reset your position back to the top of the list causing you to endlessly scroll to find where you left off. However, the end result was very “worth it” for me because it gives me pretty images for each game on my list.
Once you have finished setting all of the game images, click the button at the bottom of the screen with the Controller and Steam icon. This will export all of your game data to Steam so that it shows up correctly when you are in game mode. If you boot back into Game Mode, you will in theory see a bunch of grid images in place of the ugly grey rectangles and get an interface that looks something like the image at the beginning of this post. Now you should be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your effort.
Troubleshooting Issues
Ultimately you are going to get some games and more specifically platforms… to work without any issues. Others are going to require a lot of troubleshooting to get working correctly. Currently, I have the following platforms working under the combination of emulators that this process installs.
Dreamcast
Gameboy Advance
Genesis
Nintendo
Nintendo 64
PlayStation
PSP
Super Nintendo
Turbografx 16
Of the emulators that I have moved data over to the SD Card for, I cannot seem to get 32X and Sega CD working, but have also not spent a ton of time troubleshooting those. Thankfully on the EmuDeck GitHub page, there is a cheat sheet of sorts that lists what types of ROMs and Archives each emulator will support. This is not 100% correct at all times, however, because for Dreamcast it clearly states that it will support 7zip archives, and the Rom Manager identified those games… but I could not get ANY of the Dreamcast games to load until I extracted them to individual directories.
The biggest thing that you will run into with any of the semi-modern consoles is that they require a BIOS image in order to work. This is essentially how emulator developers get around the copyrighted portions of code, but rely on you to acquire a legally dumped boot image. You will have to research what is needed for each system, but once I supplied the correct BIOS for Dreamcast and Playstation those games started working beautifully. I need to put in some research into how DuckStation handles multidisk games, because right now the only PS1 game that I have copied over that is working, is Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
So You Bricked Your Steam Deck
This is not my image, but I absolutely went through this when I copied files to the wrong location. Essentially it is possible to get into a boot loop where you just see a cursor… before rebooting again and it goes on forever. Essentially in my case, this was caused by getting confused and accidentally flooding my internal storage with ROMs… eating up all of the remaining space. As I said earlier if you fill your internal storage too full and the system cannot create certain temporary files on boot… it will get stuck in this loop.
Thankfully Valve foresaw this happening and has provided bootable media that can fix it. The Steam Recovery disk is in theory designed to allow you to reinstall the operating system or nuke your home directory, but it is so much more valuable than that. It is essentially a “live” version of SteamOS that boots from removable storage. Thankfully I had spare SD Cards laying around, and in order to use that method, it requires at least 8GB of storage. You can in theory also do this off a bootable thumb drive connected to the USB C port via an A to C adapter of some sort.
How I got around NOT deleting all of my progress, was that while in the Live OS I just opened up Dolphin and browsed to the directory where I had copied the ROMs… then deleted them. After doing this make sure you also remove them from the Trash as they will still be taking up disk space until you have done this step. In theory, you should be able to reboot and your pricey toy comes back to life. If you did something more severe to bung up your system, you can use the disk to reinstall the base operating system from scratch. As I said I did not want to take this step if I could help it, because it would have undone all of the work I had already finished on getting things running on my device.
What’s Next?
I think the next big thing that is on my radar is getting both PlayStation remote play and Xbox remote play working. Other than that, however, I think my Deck is in a pretty good state. I want to fiddle around a bit more with the emulators that I technically have installed but are not working for whatever reason. The big one for me would be able to get Breath of the Wild working with durability cheats, and maybe work a bit on getting some 3DS games loading successfully.
I think everything else is probably going to wait until I get my 1TB m.2 drive from eBay. I picked up an M.2 to USB adapter and I have high hopes of using it and Clonezilla to effectively clone all of my progress from my 64GB internal drive to the new 1TB internal. I mostly don’t want to do too much effort if I know I might possibly have to start over from scratch again with a fresh operating system install. Thankfully however I already have the recovery disk primed to install the operating system fresh on the new drive if it comes to that.
