Using Emulation Station on Steam Deck: A Beginner's Guide

The Steam Deck is a powerful handheld gaming device that can run a wide variety of games, including classic consoles and PCs. One of the best ways to experience these games on the Steam Deck is through the use of emulation stations. In this article, we'll explore how to set up Emulation Station on your Steam Deck and what it has to offer.

Emulation Station: A Powerful Frontend for Emulators

One of the most exciting features of the Steam Deck is its built-in emulator called EmuDeck. However, using EmuDeck alone can be limiting, as it only offers a limited selection of games and emulators. That's where Emulation Station comes in. This powerful frontend allows you to organize your games and emulators in a user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate and find the game you want to play.

Using Retro Arch with Emulation Station

For this tutorial, I'll be using Retro Arch as my emulator of choice. Retro Arch is a popular emulator that supports a wide range of systems, including the Dreamcast. To set up Retro Arch in Emulation Station, simply download and install the Retro Arch package from the Steam Deck's app store. This will give you access to a variety of emulators, including FlyCast, which is one of my favorites for playing Dreamcast games.

Creating Custom Hotkeys

One of the best things about Emulation Station is its ability to create custom hotkeys. These hotkeys allow you to quickly switch between different emulators and games, making it easy to navigate your collection. In this case, I've set up a hotkey that brings me directly into Emulation Station from Retro Arch. This allows me to quickly access my game library and switch between different emulators.

Setting Up Retro Arch with FlyCast

For Dreamcast emulation, I'm using the FlyCast core within Retro Arch. This is one of the most popular and well-supported cores for playing Dreamcast games on the Steam Deck. With FlyCast, you can enjoy a wide range of classic games, including Soul Calibur, in high quality.

Using Emulation Station with the Built-in Controller

One of the best things about Emulation Station is its ability to work seamlessly with the Steam Deck's built-in controller. When I launch a game from Emulation Station, the controller works perfectly out of the box, allowing me to play games like Soul Calibur without any issues.

Real-World Applications and Future Developments

While EmuDeck is still a powerful emulator, using Emulation Station on your Steam Deck can open up new possibilities for gamers. For example, if you're planning to set up a large collection of emulators, Emulation Station can help you organize and manage them in a user-friendly interface.

For those who prefer to stick with a single emulator, like EmuDeck, it's still possible to set up Emulation Station on your Steam Deck. This can be done by installing the Emulation Station package from the app store and then configuring it to work with your existing emulators.

Conclusion

In conclusion, using Emulation Station on your Steam Deck is a great way to experience a wide range of games and emulators in a user-friendly interface. With its powerful features and customization options, Emulation Station can help you organize your game collection and make it easy to navigate between different emulators. Whether you're a seasoned gamer or just starting out, Emulation Station is definitely worth checking out.

Accessing the Emulation Station Desktop Edition

For those who want to get hands-on with Emulation Station before the official tutorial is released, I recommend visiting the Emulation Station desktop edition website and downloading the Flat Pack for Arch Linux (mainly Manjaro). From there, you can download a Steam Deck-specific version of the app image. This will give you access to Emulation Station on your Steam Deck, where you can experiment with its features and customization options.

Future Developments and Tutorials

Stay tuned for future tutorials and guides on how to set up EmuDeck, Retro Arch, Botocera, and other emulators on your Steam Deck. I'll be covering everything from basic setup to advanced customization options, so be sure to check back for more content in the coming weeks.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again this is going to be a quick one but i was super excited about this and keep in mind this is not a tutorial video i just kind of wanted to show this off i will have my tutorial videos coming up very soon so make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn notifications on but ever since the steam deck released everybody wanted a nice little emulation front-end in steamos 3.0 and with emu deck it's totally possible to add your games right here along with collections i've got a full tutorial on setting up emu deck really soon but as soon as i finished with that tutorial i got to thinking about emulation station and just running emulation station and steam os 3.0 originally i was going to build it from scratch but i did some research and i found emulation station desktop edition and if you head over to their website they actually have an app image specifically made for the steam gag it's really easy to get set up but i would highly recommend using emu deck first get all that set up then all you really need to do is download the app image start it up and all of your games are going to automatically populate and your emulators are already going to be set up now like i mentioned this isn't a tutorial video but those may already be out as of watching this so check the links in the description i will post them there but this was super exciting to me because ever since i got my hands on the steam deck one thing i wanted to do was run retropie orbottosera now with those we will be able to do that in the future i'm 100 sure of it and we can run those from a usb drive but then we're kind of stuck without using steam os or we'd at least have to reboot in the steam os and with it set up like this we've got basically everything we need on the steam deck we've got steam with all of our pc games you could just use emu deck if you want to launch your games directly from steam os or you can set up emulation station as you can see here and have a really nice little front end interface to go through and play your favorite retro games you can add your own themes just like you can on the raspberry pi this version that i'm using in this video only has two different themes but you can always add your own down the road if you want to it's got a scraper built in and you can scrape videos this way using the screen scraper and with that i would highly recommend getting an account over there if you know you're going to be setting up a lot of different retro emulators on your steam deck but yeah so far it's been working really well and as long as i have steam up and running in the background because we're just running it on the steam deck with steam os the built-in controller worked right out of the box with emulation station there was really nothing i had to do let's go ahead and launch a game here we'll go with soul calibur for dreamcast and you can add basically any emulator you want to emulation station i'm just using retro arch with the flycast core and i can go ahead and turn this display off over on the left hand side so we can get a better look at the screen i'll just turn it to let's say the fps i'm just going to jump right into a little bit of dreamcast emulation real quick and with this you can always set up hotkeys to automatically go back into emulation station or you could set it up to close emulation station down completely if you wanted to but like i mentioned i'm using retroarch here and i've got my hotkey set up as l3 and r3 and this will bring me right into emulation station so i can go through and change to the resolution and do basically whatever i want or i can completely exit the emulator right back in the emulation station but remember hotkeys can always be set up with this so all you need to do is press two buttons and it'll automatically exit that game moving over to a little bit of psp emulation and still using retro arch i find that the core here works really well even with a nice little upscale you can go with the standalone version of ppsspp if you want to but i've just kind of kept everything from emu deck over to emulation station and that's what it uses right out of the box but yeah this is totally gonna change the game for the steam deck and don't get me wrong i'm still excited to get botocera installed on this you know running from a usb drive or the micro sd card or even just completely wipe the internal storage and run it from there but when it comes down to it there's a lot of people out there that would just want to set up emulation station just like it is in steam os that way they don't have to wipe anything they can always delete that from their internal storage or micro sd card depending on where you're running it from and we've still got access to steam os and pc games i can just go right into the menu and shut emulation station down now it's going to bring us right back into steam os and i can start playing my favorite pc games from right here but yeah i mean this is really great if you want to go with just emu deck and have all of your games and collections right on the main menu that's totally fine too it works out really well but i love having a nice little front end like emulation station on a handheld like this and it's really easy to set up like i mentioned i've got tutorials on the way i will leave links to those in the description of this video in case you're watching it in the future first up i'll be doing a full tutorial on setting up emu deck and then the next video i post will be setting up emulation station after the fact and real quick just in case you want to mess around with the emulation station on the steam deck before i get my tutorials out you can head over to the emulation station desktop edition website scroll on down you'll see that they do offer a flat pack for uh arch mainly manjaro but if we check out the app images which basically all we need to do is download it and click on it there's one here for the steam deck so this is really awesome first edition for the steam deck it will get better but as making this video i've been messing around with it for about six hours and overall it's been really stable and i've had a really good time with it so i'll leave a link to this website in the description in case you want to mess around with it before i get that tutorial out but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching i'd actually like to know how you're going to have your steam deck set up are you just going to install something like retropie or botocera completely or are you gonna run something like emulation station inside of steam os let me know in the comments below along with any questions you have and like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again this is going to be a quick one but i was super excited about this and keep in mind this is not a tutorial video i just kind of wanted to show this off i will have my tutorial videos coming up very soon so make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn notifications on but ever since the steam deck released everybody wanted a nice little emulation front-end in steamos 3.0 and with emu deck it's totally possible to add your games right here along with collections i've got a full tutorial on setting up emu deck really soon but as soon as i finished with that tutorial i got to thinking about emulation station and just running emulation station and steam os 3.0 originally i was going to build it from scratch but i did some research and i found emulation station desktop edition and if you head over to their website they actually have an app image specifically made for the steam gag it's really easy to get set up but i would highly recommend using emu deck first get all that set up then all you really need to do is download the app image start it up and all of your games are going to automatically populate and your emulators are already going to be set up now like i mentioned this isn't a tutorial video but those may already be out as of watching this so check the links in the description i will post them there but this was super exciting to me because ever since i got my hands on the steam deck one thing i wanted to do was run retropie orbottosera now with those we will be able to do that in the future i'm 100 sure of it and we can run those from a usb drive but then we're kind of stuck without using steam os or we'd at least have to reboot in the steam os and with it set up like this we've got basically everything we need on the steam deck we've got steam with all of our pc games you could just use emu deck if you want to launch your games directly from steam os or you can set up emulation station as you can see here and have a really nice little front end interface to go through and play your favorite retro games you can add your own themes just like you can on the raspberry pi this version that i'm using in this video only has two different themes but you can always add your own down the road if you want to it's got a scraper built in and you can scrape videos this way using the screen scraper and with that i would highly recommend getting an account over there if you know you're going to be setting up a lot of different retro emulators on your steam deck but yeah so far it's been working really well and as long as i have steam up and running in the background because we're just running it on the steam deck with steam os the built-in controller worked right out of the box with emulation station there was really nothing i had to do let's go ahead and launch a game here we'll go with soul calibur for dreamcast and you can add basically any emulator you want to emulation station i'm just using retro arch with the flycast core and i can go ahead and turn this display off over on the left hand side so we can get a better look at the screen i'll just turn it to let's say the fps i'm just going to jump right into a little bit of dreamcast emulation real quick and with this you can always set up hotkeys to automatically go back into emulation station or you could set it up to close emulation station down completely if you wanted to but like i mentioned i'm using retroarch here and i've got my hotkey set up as l3 and r3 and this will bring me right into emulation station so i can go through and change to the resolution and do basically whatever i want or i can completely exit the emulator right back in the emulation station but remember hotkeys can always be set up with this so all you need to do is press two buttons and it'll automatically exit that game moving over to a little bit of psp emulation and still using retro arch i find that the core here works really well even with a nice little upscale you can go with the standalone version of ppsspp if you want to but i've just kind of kept everything from emu deck over to emulation station and that's what it uses right out of the box but yeah this is totally gonna change the game for the steam deck and don't get me wrong i'm still excited to get botocera installed on this you know running from a usb drive or the micro sd card or even just completely wipe the internal storage and run it from there but when it comes down to it there's a lot of people out there that would just want to set up emulation station just like it is in steam os that way they don't have to wipe anything they can always delete that from their internal storage or micro sd card depending on where you're running it from and we've still got access to steam os and pc games i can just go right into the menu and shut emulation station down now it's going to bring us right back into steam os and i can start playing my favorite pc games from right here but yeah i mean this is really great if you want to go with just emu deck and have all of your games and collections right on the main menu that's totally fine too it works out really well but i love having a nice little front end like emulation station on a handheld like this and it's really easy to set up like i mentioned i've got tutorials on the way i will leave links to those in the description of this video in case you're watching it in the future first up i'll be doing a full tutorial on setting up emu deck and then the next video i post will be setting up emulation station after the fact and real quick just in case you want to mess around with the emulation station on the steam deck before i get my tutorials out you can head over to the emulation station desktop edition website scroll on down you'll see that they do offer a flat pack for uh arch mainly manjaro but if we check out the app images which basically all we need to do is download it and click on it there's one here for the steam deck so this is really awesome first edition for the steam deck it will get better but as making this video i've been messing around with it for about six hours and overall it's been really stable and i've had a really good time with it so i'll leave a link to this website in the description in case you want to mess around with it before i get that tutorial out but that's going to wrap it up for this one really appreciate you watching i'd actually like to know how you're going to have your steam deck set up are you just going to install something like retropie or botocera completely or are you gonna run something like emulation station inside of steam os let me know in the comments below along with any questions you have and like always thanks for watching you\n"