It's getting a little STEAMy in here.

[hngkong]

I have some pretty big hands and I haven't minded the D pad so far. In fact, it works better than the control stick for me in a lot of games, since the stick has too much play when I release it, which ends up making my character face in the opposite direction.

[Crick]

Oh interesting! I must be... holding it weird? Not sure. Maybe I have weak baby thumbs.

[zaratustra]

Loco Roco on Steam Deck worked fine the first time, and absolute junk on the second time. Controls on a delay, just terrible. Low battery maybe?

[Grath]

I put a deposit in for a 256GB Deck on Friday. I got the 'purchase available' email today; seems like they've just about gotten to the point of being able to straight-up list them for direct purchase in the store.

[Brantly B.]

I'll believe it when they do it. This is Q4, so it's juuust about time for another series of supply chain crises.

[Thad]

I guess I should probably start making notes on games I've been setting up but haven't played much yet. Maybe I'll eventually start contributing to ProtonDB.

Anyway! I have the GOG version of Witcher 3, not the Steam version. I've gotten it to work on my other PCs with Lutris, but I couldn't get the Lutris version to work on the Deck. I saw a Reddit thread suggesting that the Heroic Launcher works, and it does! I installed with the Heroic Launcher and that let me run the game okay in Desktop Mode.

I tried adding it to the Steam menu with BoilR but that didn't work; the game launched and had sound but no picture.

I tried adding it with Heroic Bash Launcher and that worked. The game launches and runs. Some stuttering; I'm going to need to do some fine-tuning.

The biggest immediately-obvious problem is the text size. It is tiny, and I don't know if there's anything I can do about that.

[Grath]

Arriving less than a week after I put in the deposit for it is pretty solid, I'm sure it'll trail out longer once it gets closer to Christmas but I'm impressed so far.

Edit three hours later:

Called it.

[Caithness]

I got mine yesterday, but the 3rd party dock I ordered isn't coming until tomorrow, and the only games I have need both ethernet and a fight stick.

[Grath]

What could possibly go wrong playing fighting games with a standard joystick on McDonald's wifi?

[Thad]

I got mine yesterday, but the 3rd party dock I ordered isn't coming until tomorrow, and the only games I have need both ethernet and a fight stick.

I finally unwrapped my third-party dock today and got far enough to confirm that it'll output 4:3 VGA. Didn't go as far as trying it on my CRT; that feels like it'll be a whole thing. I'd love for RetroArch's CRT Switchres to handle the heavy lifting, but I am skeptical that will be the case.

Also I found that Lutris doesn't have an install script for the itch.io version of Anodyne I got in the Racial Justice Bundle, so I wrote one myself and it works! (Though to use the D-pad you have to set the D-pad to emulate a joystick. And then disable the haptic feedback it inexplicably defaults to when you do that.) It's waiting on moderator approval but I'll link it once it's up.

[Thad]

I'll believe it when they do it.

They did it. The Deck and the Dock are both available to order, no reservations, estimated shipping time 1-2 weeks. (I got mine exactly 1 week after ordering.)

The dock's out, and looks...fine. I'm not sure what it does that you don't get from a generic dock at half the price.

I got something from a brand called UGREEN that has a VGA out; I'm hoping to set it up on my CRT TV. Not sure if I'll get a second dock for my living room; that seems like it would be kind of redundant given that I've already got a PC with Steam hooked up to that TV. (It is getting on about time to upgrade that PC; I'm figuring I'll wait until after the new AMD graphics cards are released next month.)

This is Q4, so it's juuust about time for another series of supply chain crises.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't rule out a swing back to the reserve system (and neither does Valve, in their update). We'll see how the next month or so goes.

[Thad]

steamdeckrepo.com is a dedicated site for custom Steam Deck boot videos, if you're into that sort of thing.

So far it has three different versions of "Hello. Smithers. You're. Quite good. At turning. Me on."

[Thad]

I decided to take another look at getting GZDoom to work on my Deck, because the Flatpak available in the software repos doesn't work out of the box.

I found a Reddit thread and dang, it's really easy -- there's a utility called ProtonUp (which I already previously installed) that automates downloading different compatibility tools for Steam, most notably GE Proton, which I use for lots of stuff.

Anyway, one of the compatibility layers you can download through ProtonUp is called luxtorpeda. You download it, then go into Doom's (or whatever's) properties in Steam and select luxtorpeda as the compatibility tool for running it. Then, when you launch the game, luxtorpeda comes up and gives you a list of different engines you can use, of which GZDoom is the top of the list.

I tried it for a minute and it seemed like everything was set up just great out of the box. I think I'm going to have to find where to invert the Y-axis for the mouselook, but...

...wait, Y-axis? Doom? That can't be right.

Anyway, the process should be the same for any other game Luxtor supports -- launch Morrowind with OpenMW, X-COM with OpenXcom, etc. Doesn't appear to support OpenRA (Red Alert) or Exult (Ultima 7) or GemRB (the old Infinity Engine D&D games), but it seems like there should be room to expand the list of supported titles and engines over time.

[Thad]

I also got the original Amiga version of Lemmings running, with EmuDeck/RetroArch/PUAE. Nice, I can play Lemmings on a portable system with an actual pointing device!

I've heard the Sharp X68K version is actually superior because it's got a built-in fast-forward. Maybe I'll look into that.

[Thad]

Anyway, one of the compatibility layers you can download through ProtonUp is called luxtorpeda. You download it, then go into Doom's (or whatever's) properties in Steam and select luxtorpeda as the compatibility tool for running it. Then, when you launch the game, luxtorpeda comes up and gives you a list of different engines you can use, of which GZDoom is the top of the list.

Going to need to figure out how to use it for WADs that don't have Steam launchers already, though. Your Sigils and Chex Quests and what-have-you.

[Thad]

I also got the original Amiga version of Lemmings running, with EmuDeck/RetroArch/PUAE. Nice, I can play Lemmings on a portable system with an actual pointing device!

I'm actually finding the touchpad controls to be frustratingly imprecise. I'm sure if I fiddle with them enough I can get them working, but I've also discovered that there are homebrew ports of the original Lemmings to DS and 3DS, and it kinda feels like playing with a stylus would be better than a touchpad.

(The Deck has a touchscreen but I haven't gotten it to work very well with Amiga emulation, and even if I could it would probably mean I'd have to set it on a table to play. The Deck is huge; holding it in one hand and using the other for the touchscreen isn't really feasible.)

[Thad]

The new version of Steam will finally let you copy games across your LAN -- and apparently it's set up to default to that when you install a game; if you've got another Steam instance open on the same network it'll default to copying from there instead of re-downloading from the server.

Of course you could do that before, but you had to do it manually, and it was a pain in the ass because it did the "is there enough room to install this game?" check before the "is this game already installed?" check so you had to leave an entire extra copy's worth of space on your device to do it.

Anyway, as somebody who spends a lot of time alternating from the living room to the office to the Deck, this is a welcome feature!

[Thad]

or maybe just get the Jedi Knight collection for $4?

So yeah I got that.

And since these are old games I decided to look and see if somebody's released ports of the engines, and if they're supported by Luxtorpeda.

It turns out Luxtor does support OpenJK, which runs the last two games (Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy), but not the first two.

There is a modern engine for Dark Forces, the Force Engine, but Luxtorpeda won't support it because it's reverse-engineered. As of right now there's no binary distribution, and I'm not going to fuck around with compiling from source or setting up the AUR on my Deck. (I did go ahead and install the AUR version on my main desktop but haven't tried it out yet.) There's a Flatpak release planned for the next version, and I've got plenty of other shit to play while I wait for that. I picked my 2018 KotOR 2 save back up the other day, so that'll probably satisfy whatever need I feel for a Star Wars game for awhile yet.

Doesn't look like there's any new engine for Dark Forces 2, which leaves it the odd game out of the series. But kinda neat that the other 3 have them.

[Thad]

The Asus ROG Ally beats the Steam Deck at all but the most important things

tl;dr it's got more powerful hardware and, since it's running Windows, it's got better compatibility, but its UI is a lot less mature than Big Picture and as a result you're going to be spending a lot more time fiddling around on a desktop UI -- without any touchpads. It sounds like the hardware is impressive but the software needs a lot of work.

I wish Asus luck. I'm very happy with my Deck but I'm also excited to see what else the handheld gaming PC market can come up with. Competition is good.

It seems to me that what would really be a killer feature would be a shell that has smooth integration with multiple storefronts -- Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, GOG, whatever. I don't see that happening on the Deck, for obvious reasons, but Microsoft as OS vendor or an OEM like Asus might be in a position to get buy-in from multiple competing sellers. It looks like the ROG Ally is trying to do something like that but you still have to launch a fucking browser window to log into your account first. If they manage to sand down those rough edges and get something that works more like the open-source launchers on Linux (Lutris, Heroic, etc.) then I think they'll have SteamOS' two biggest drawbacks licked (the other being compatibility).

[Thad]

The new version of Heroic Launcher includes Prime Gaming support. I tried installing SNK 40th Anniversary and it worked fine, so I think I can probably add Prime alongside GOG and Epic as a store where I don't actually buy anything but can get some cool free* shit if I keep an eye on it.

The freebies* on Prime over the past little while I've been watching it have been pretty heavy on old SNK games, which isn't a bad thing. I'd been meaning to check out the 40th Anniversary Collection because it's Digital Eclipse and they do great work. Now I can play Crystalis on my Deck! But probably won't, because I've been planning to play it on my Pocket with a couple of mods (Rebalance, Proofread, and Computer Repair; I'm interested in checking out the fan translation but I'm pretty sure that doesn't stack with the Rebalance hack).

* "Free" with a Prime subscription, in Amazon's case, and I still have one of those, ambivalent though I am about supporting the company.