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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.
I think they meant to say they also play Steam games on it, which I will say is a really good benefit of the Steam Deck over any of the Android handheld retro systems.
If someone’s trying to decide between a Steam Deck and a $300 Retro Handheld that can play through Game Cube, PS2, etc., I would try to convince them to buy the Steam Deck because it opens up a whole world of games.