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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • To answer your question, yes, and I highly recommend it! The screen is huge and beautiful and it emulates games amazingly. In addition, it plays half? of the Steam library. There are so many awesome indie games and modern retro games like The Messenger that make the Steam Deck such a compelling handheld console.

    My thoughts on Emudeck:

    I tried Emudeck at first and ended up uninstalling it. It doesnt do anything you can’t do manually, and it did things I didn’t like.

    Disclaimer, I am not a RetroArch “pro”, but I’ve been using it for decades. I know a lot of its quirks, and how to do pretty much everything.

    Emudeck has these global options to let you map hotkeys, aspect ratios, and choose whether or not you want shaders enabled for consoles (CRT shaders) or handhelds (LCD shaders). Plus other things. It’s yes or no for each thing, mostly, and it will configure all emulators tonsuit your options. Not RetroArch and any standalones.

    The way it configures these things in RetroArch is by saving override files. I will admit I don’t fully understand override files, but I do use preset files a lot. In any case, I was unable to save any of my custom changes in RetroArch. I would find some setting I didn’t like, or some hotkey I wanted to change because Emudeck’s default didn’t suit me, and I could change it while RA was running, but then if I tried to save my options, it wouldn’t let me because “override file in use”. That was very frustrating.

    So I ended up uninstalling it and manually installing RetroArch from the app store (“Discover”). And if I needed DuckStation or some other standard-alone that worked better than RA (or a Switch emulator or something), I just installed the flatpack and confiured it myself.

    You also don’t need EmuDeck to install ROM Manager which let’s you add specific ROMs to your Steam Library, although I have not done that myself yet. I don’t think it’s a killer feature, really. Not worth the effort. I just launch RetroArch where I have a Favorites menu and a History menu. I did have to manually add RetroArch to Steam which is trivially easy in desktop mode (right click the icon and click “Add to Steam”). Then I used a Decky plugin to configure art for it. Decky is awesome, BTW. It’s a whole plugin system for the Steam Deck.

    In the end, EmuDeck did nothing I couldn’t do myself, and made it worse for a RetroArch power user like myself. Just my two cents.













  • Please don’t indent lines on lemmy. It causes the markdown to render it as a code block, which requires horizontal scrolling to read.

    Use bullets instead: an asterisk followed by a space:

    * Applying to job positions & negotiating better offers
    * Leveling up in the AI age to stay irreplaceable
    * Starting a side hustle (like a small SaaS, automation tool, etc.)
    * Freelancing & getting clients
    * Building an online presence (LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.) to attract opportunities
    

    To make this:

    • Applying to job positions & negotiating better offers
    • Leveling up in the AI age to stay irreplaceable
    • Starting a side hustle (like a small SaaS, automation tool, etc.)
    • Freelancing & getting clients
    • Building an online presence (LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.) to attract opportunities


  • I feel very weird calling old games that I thought of as retro “vintage” now, but I guess I have to.

    Nah. Maybe? Even I call them retro games sometimes. My favorite gaming hardware YouTube channel is called “Retro Game Corps”. It what gamers call them. Depending on who I’m addressing, I use either.

    Like I said in my original comment, I was mostly being pedantic. Then again, if the entire gaming world shifted to calling them “vintage games”, I’d be thrilled. Someone recently started a thread here titled “What’s your favorite vintage game?” And I did a “Not bad Obama” face and nod.

    in Victoria, Australia…

    Well, yeah! I expect everything be upsidedown and backwards there! 😜

    Now I’m curious how the Macquarie Dictionary defines the word. I can’t search it myself because it requires a login.


  • When people are calling modern things they know are modern “retro”, I think it’s just a simpler form of saying “retro-style”.

    “People” in general? No. Only certain gamers.

    It seems like you missed the entire point of my comment, and you’re the exact kind of person I’m talking about. A person who has no idea what retro means. You are using it wrong. And by wrong I mean unlike everybody else in the world.

    This is what people mean when they say retro, (except you and some other gamers):

    relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned

    a retro look

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retro

    Saying retro style is redundant. Retro is already referring to style.

    “Retro”, which to me indicates its actual age.

    The word you’re looking for is “vintage”. Retro means in the style of the past.