With this week’s shot across the bows from Nintendo to the emulator community – well, more of a direct hit really, you might expect those involved in the emulation scene to be keeping their heads down a bit for a while. The eradication of Switch Emulator Yuzu from the universe (well, apart from all the clones that have instantly popped up all over the internet) was an example of a corporate giant saying, no, you are not playing our games on anything but our hardware.
Whatever the legal grey areas of emulation and whatever side of the fence you sit on (for disclosure I have been using emulators for years and years from Mame-based arcade cabinets to recreating my console libraries of yesteryear) it’s probably not going away and is an undoubted factor in the purchase of many a handheld gaming PC over the past year or so.
The ability to play modern PC games on a handheld such as the Steam Deck or the Rog Ally is a huge draw, but an awful lot of people choose to install emulators on them as well so they can take large libraries of their favourite games with them when they otherwise couldn’t.
I’ve recently been playing one of my favorite games ever, SSX Tricky for the PlayStation 2 on my ROG Ally and it is amazing to play while you are commuting about.
This has all been made possible by EmuDeck, a piece of utility software that will install a raft of emulators onto your Steam Deck or any other handheld PC and configure them all for easy play.
It doesn’t install anything that any company might consider illegal, such as Switch Bios’ or game ROMs. You can then choose what to supply yourself depending on what you want to play. There’s that grey area again.
Anyway, EmuDeck has been an essential install for me and the new 2.2 version has just been released and brings with it four new emulators – all of older systems:
Flycast for Sega Dreamcast, Naomi, Naomi 2, and Atomiswave
BigPemu for the Atari Jaguar
Model 2 for the Sega Model 2
Model 3 for the Sega Model 3
So playing classic arcades such as Daytona and Crazy Taxi on the train should now be possible.
More controversially in the current climate, existing EmuDeck installs that have already installed YuZu and Citra will not see them removed, they just can’t be added to new installs. EmuDeck is not in the business of telling people what should and shouldn’t be on your hardware if an individual chooses to have it there. Grey area alert.
There’s also an all-new UI design for emulator installs, but there were some issues highlighted on Reddit last night that the install was causing issues, so if you are an EmuDeck user, or want to try it out, maybe it’s worth hanging on a day or too
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