Batocera on SteamDeck

#emulation #game #gaming #retro

I stumbled across my own SteamDeck, so of course the natural first thing to do is see how it fares with emulating other gaming consoles.

I refrain from saying the word retro as I was born in the 90's and want to believe the 3DS isn't a retro console (or else my bones will wither into dust)

EmuDeck

Through all the rave reviews, I tried EmuDeck first as it seemed like the most one click install option. I'm all about automation, so let's let all the hard work of these nerds set my system up in perfect configuration

Batocera

https://batocera.org/

Multiplayer

The main reason why I chose Batocera was the way it handles multiple gamepads.

Being a portable device, I need it to be easy pairing and auto port assigning gamepads across emulators. Something that EmuDeck can't offer. I don't want to be fiddling around assigning controllers per emulator, especially when I don't have a keyboard and mouse on the ready.

Older emulators

Note that Batocera uses older versions of some emulators like Dolphin Emu. If you are in need of the bleeding edge features, you may want to try something else. But I like consistency, so this works for me.

Samba

With your Batocera machine on and connect to a private network, from another computer access the device. With Linux Mint I can drop smb://steam-deck.local/share/ into my file browser address bar and get straight there

you may need to replace steam-deck.local with your machine's hostname or IP address.

Windows Network

On Windows you can check under your Networks tab and find it.

Password

You may want to enable a password for your deck's samba share if you ever plan on connecting it to a public netowrk

attachments/Pasted image 20241125221410.png

AR Geko Code How to

add codes in Dolphin-emu through text files remotely

Find Game file

smb://steam-deck.local/share/saves/dolphin-emu/GameSettings/*.ini

example Mario Kart Double Dash is GM4E01.ini

Add Code

Edit the .ini file. Here I'm adding 2 widescreen codes

[Gecko]  
$widescreen-ralph  
04003F20 809F4EB4  
04003F24 28030003  
04003F28 40800008  
...  
  
$widescreen-menu-ralph  
06003860 0000007C  
807B00DC 28030000  
4182006C 3CA0C2CC  
3CC04432 3C000953  
...  
  
[Gecko_Enabled]  
$widescreen-ralph  
$widescreen-menu-ralph

This adds the code and enables without having to touch the UI

Battery Life

I won't say I did any extensive testing, but I believe the battery life is much more efficient when running games or idling Batocera.

cloud saves

rclone

-https://github.com/peterbozso/batocera-backup-service

syncthing

Troubleshooting