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Comment by peanuty1 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard the Steam Deck emulates Switch games like Zelda BOTW much better than the Switch. And it's not much more expensive either.

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This is not correct, but there are many people making this claim. Yuzu is arguably the most popular emulator, and only around 20% of games work well out of the box (https://yuzu-emu.org/game/). A further 30% require tweaks, or operate sub-optimally. The remaining 50% either don't run at all or offer a terrible experience. The thing to remember is that even if you pick one of the games in the "perfect" category, it's still not perfect. For example, you often have to content with hours and hours of "shader" loading. This means choppy and and strange graphical glitches. Further, drivers for various systems are not perfect, and sometimes certain features utilising, for example, the gyroscope, don't work correctly.

There is a VERY vocal minority of Linux gamers who have VERY rose coloured glasses on for anything Linux. I expect some of them to respond to this comment with some variation of "well I have never had any problems with Yuzu. It's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my whole life!!!"

20% of switch-exclusive games or 20% of complete switch library? I suspect cross-platform releases aren't in high priority.

Unfortunately it's even worse if we focus on exclusive. These are the top selling Switch games: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...). Of the top 10, not a single one is in "Perfect" condition.

Mario Kart: "Okay"

Animal Crossing: "Great"

Super Smash Bros: "Okay"

Breath of the Wild: "Great"

Pokemon Sword and Shield: "Okay"

Super Mario Odyssey: "Great"

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: No support

Super Mario Part: "Okay"

Super Mario Bros U: "Okay"

Ring Fit Adventure: No support

I own a Switch, but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch. Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place. Plus the Deck is a much more comfortable for me to hold - more ergonomic, better fit for larger hands.

> but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch.

Debating what ? Are you pulling the "IP owners don't make their products available on my platform so I am forced to pirate it" netflix card when you own the device the game is supposed to be played on ?

If you read my comment, I said I'd pay for it either way. At that point while I might be technically pirating, I don't think I am ethically.

No, you wrote (emphasis mine):

> Either way I'll probably buy it [..]

If you don't for sure buy it then there is no debating playing it on deck unless what you are debating is playing the game or not.

He’s not debating on whether to pay for the game, he’s debating on where he’ll get the best experience with it.

It just happens to be that one of those options requires pirating game instead of paying for it.

Yeah, probably.

You're also not paying for their hardware. Like Apple, since they own both sides of the equation, the hardware is part of their pricing model.

Unless you also own a switch, in which case disregard!

I do in fact own a Switch (as I wrote above).

I would have thought that the console doesn't have much effect on the financial model though. The margin on the console has to be fairly low, and they sell many games for each console sale. I've always assumed that the vast majority of their profit was from the game sales.

Sorry, missed that part :(

TBH I don't know. Apple is obviously a hardware company that happens to make software.

As you say, Nintendo does sell software as you say. But there's plenty of people out there who buy the devices for a couple of games. The people that always just want whatever the latest Mario Kart or Smash Bros is, or whatever.

That's why I've figured they view themselves as a bit of a hybrid. If they viewed themselves as a software company I'd think they would be less fanatical about having their own hardware.

Do you act with the same rampant indignation at people who rip their dvd/blu rays to a home NAS so they can watch them without having to faff about looking for the disc?

Maybe read the whole comment first before reacting in future?

> Maybe read the whole comment first before reacting in future?

You mean that part ? Where it says "probably" ? Yeah, I read it. It says "probably".

> Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place.

> Do you act with the same rampant indignation at people who rip their dvd/blu rays to a home NAS so they can watch them without having to faff about looking for the disc?

Only those who claim they probably have the dvd/blu rays somewhere or are planning to "probably" buy them while claiming they'll watch the rip on their home NAS because it's much more convenient.

It's a no-brainer for me. The headache of setting up emulation of consoles more modern than about N64 era makes it way less appealing right from the start, plus the Switch is way lighter, and all the native hardware features just work better when you aren't going through a few levels of translation (Steam's controller mapping is great, but gyro working seamlessly is hard to beat, and amiibo support is a hassle to replicate). The Switch is a bit less comfortable to hold on its own, but there are lots of grips that fix that problem (I'm a fan of the Skull & Co one).

I've found emudeck on the Steam Deck to be surprisingly easy (I have a low tolerance for that sort of tinkering in my spare time). Downloading the right ROMs has been a little more painful (and slow), but once you've got them it's generally been just SCPing them onto the deck and then pressing the button to generate the menu entries.

Admittedly though, I don't care about amiibos or motion controls (I always turn them off when using my Switch).

Thank you for being part of normalizing consumer freedom while being responsible enough to support the people who worked on the thing.

Part of what makes the discussion of emulators or alternative means of playing games so difficult, is that the loudest voices are those who make it clear that they have no intention of actually buying the product to begin with.

It makes it hard for any conversation around the publisher’s pushback to “protect their IP” to move beyond their need to protect their income stream, and into the legitimate reasons a consumer would want to have more control over how they play the publisher’s game.

To offer a counterpoint - the Deck is heavy. For a system that is meant to be chiefly used as a handheld, the thing borders on being as heavy as your average laptop, which gets quite tiring on your arms after a while.

The Switch' fit is a lot lighter by comparison, which is quite nice.

Can I play the Steam Deck handheld (with controllers attached), on kickstand with controllers detracted and split, docked with controllers in a dock to make a single controller, and docked with controller split and turned sideways for two player?

Sort of, yes - at least, the linux kernel has built in support for Nintendo controller connections over bluetooth, and there are some userspace drivers (or dkms, or maybe they've been merged into mainline now, `joycond` iirc) for support for split/merged/2p joycons. There's the Steam Dock peripheral for playing it docked to a TV just like the switch. The only thing missing is the ability to stow the joycons into the body of the deck (it has a built in controller so you don't need the joycons to play handheld), and you'd have to get a case for the deck with a kickstand as there isn't one built in. I've been using a Switch Pro controller to play TotK via Yuzu and it works perfectly, gyro included.

Steam Deck supports external gamepads. There's a dock too. It even supports switch joycons though you can't split them.

Obviously you can't attach controllers directly to the deck, but it does support a ton of controllers including the Switch ones. With motion control etc.

The Deck is impressive and wonderful, but it's not exactly a high end gaming device. Emulating ARM code efficiently requires a significant amount of CPU power and my experience is that the Deck doesn't quite have the CPU capacity to keep up with heavier emulated titles.

I expect the new Logitech handheld (or the many other, even more expensive competitors) to perform much better in this regard.

In a perfect world, emulators such as Skyline would be developed further. As the Switch is just a five year old mid tier Android tablet with a controller attached, I can only imagine the experience if you were to use the KVM capabilities of the upcoming Android 14 to run Switch software at near native performance on modern devices. Just buy one of those controller grips for phone and tablets and you're off!

iPhones/iPads would do even better, but I doubt Apple is going to let you use the necessary APIs to virtualize like that.

It's a shame Skyline has been killed off. With terrible games like that Pokémon game needing much more CPU power than the Switch can provide, I imagine even legitimate players would be interested in a way to play their switch games on modern hardware.

You're right (and interesting, I didn't know that about Android 14) but fwiw, Yuzu performance is vastly improved on the deck by installing the power tools (iirc) plugin via Decky, and disabling SMT. There's a bug in the OS which is due to be patched in the next major version which should prevent SMT from tanking Yuzu and various other games.

Problem with emulators is that at some point they will fail you, and you will lose some saves.

Wrong.

I've used every emulator except the switch emu, and not only do you not randomly lose saves, you can duplicate, move them, etc.

I've used emulators on laptops, desktops, phones, etc.

And I have even transferred saves between them and never had an issue.

I have- right now, saves over 20+ years old.

Wrong.

I've used every emulator including the switch emu, and not only do you randomly lose saves, you can lose duplicates.

I've used emulators on laptops, desktops, phones, etc.

And I have even transferred saves between them and see files being corrupted.

I have- right now, saves over 20+ years old (tales of fantasia in japanese).

I just lost 10 hours of gameplay from Seiken Densetsu 2 on Emu Deck last month.

Wrong.

Sounds like you have a hard drive issue bud.

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