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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.

    Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.

    This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.

    Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:

    Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks

    But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.

    Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.

    A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.

    A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.

    Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.

    This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.

    At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.


  • My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.

    I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).

    I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.

    This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.







  • I use the Steam controller, (obviously not helpful since they don’t make it anymore) most of the time.

    I also have the remake of the old Xbox “duke” from a few years back. The largeness of it in my smaller hands always felt surprisingly comfortable. It’s wired and recognised as generic xbox one controller - BUT only when running steam. If steam isn’t open, then the controller continuously turns off and back on every 20 seconds.

    I have a few DS4 controllers sitting here that still work. Eh. Not much use but they work fairly well. I don’t really like the PlayStation control design.

    I have never tried a Switch / Switch-compatible controller on yet. My partner has a couple for… the Switch! But I’m hoping they do well because I just bought my daughter a Sonic-themed, Gamecube-style wired controller for her upcoming birthday (she obsessed with Sonic and saying she wants to play a game one day instead of just watching). It would be good if she can just take it between playing Switch with her mum or PC with me.

    Final comments -it’s wired or replaceable batteries for me. So many dead DS3 and DS4 controllers sitting around from years back that won’t charge, or last about 15 minutes. But wires never get in the way anyway, and I always have eneloop AAs ready to go.






  • It’s not retroarch. If you have been in emulation for a while that’s enough right there. No one is reusing retroarch cores here.

    https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Ares

    If you don’t want to spend 3 hours setting up an emulator, ares is basically just: open software, click to open what you want to play. The interface isn’t trying to reinvent a weird ps3 or Switch hybrid on your pc. It is similar to regular desktop software ui you might have used during your life.

    Ares was developed by Near (rip). If you don’t know who that is, it’s a shame, but I’m not going to go into it here. It’s now maintained by people continuing Near’s work on trying to achieve cycle accurate, preservation quality emulation.

    Some of the emulation cores, SNES, 32x, N64, MegaDrive and Sega CD are the best in class, by a wide margin. Turbografx is comparable if not better than mednafen. SNES especially good since that was Near’s main focus for many years - you might know it as bsnes or higan from before they started pushing the ares emulator more before they died.

    Some systems are definitely best played elsewhere (mgba is better for gba, Stella is better for 2600, Duckstation for ps1, Sameboy for gameboy colour). But that defeats the purpose of your question. For the sake of having all the emulation in one place, ares usually do fine with these.

    It can be taxing. If you are running an older underpowered machine, you might not have a good time.




  • I have a HTPC setup for steam gaming using Micro OS. I haven’t touched it in a few months, but for the earlier parts of this year I frequently played Dead Cells, Art of Rally, Bloodstained, Vampire Survivor, Stardew Valley, games like that.

    I used a couple of PS4 controllers via Bluetooth, just using the touchpad on the controller for if I needed to use a mouse cursor on the desktop or something.

    One gripe was that I couldn’t get MicroOS to auto login, so I had to keep a keyboard next to the tv so I could sign in everything I wanted to play a game.