Review: Steam Deck 64GB

After viewing some positive reviews of the new Valve Steam Deck, I decided to take the plunge and try it myself.

I have always wanted to play old-school Arcade games (using MAME emulation) on a portable device. In addition, I was intrigued that the Steam Deck could also run games from Wii, Wii U, PSP, and the latest Nintendo Switch (in addition to most PC games).

 

Since Amazon did not have any in stock, I ordered directly from Valve (which had a 1-2 week shipping time). I decided on the 64GB version since I would upgrade the onboard drive to 1TB anyway.

I selected the Sabrent Rocket 2230 NVMe drive and used the iFixit guide to disassemble the Steam Deck. I also purchased the iFixit kit to have access to all the required tools for assembling and disassembling the deck.

Removing the 8 screws on the back of the deck was easy, but opening the deck took a bit of time and patience. Once opened, most of the other screws were easy to remove.

The only difficulties I ran into were:

1. Disconnecting the battery
2. Re-attaching the metal foil shield around the Sabrent Rocket 2230 NVMe 
3. Reconnecting the battery

After reassembly, I inserted a pre-formatted USB-C drive into the Steam Deck and tried to boot (the Steam Recovery image was already on the 64GB SanDisk USB-C drive). Initially, it failed to boot, but I managed to boot into a recovery screen. It took about 10 minutes for all of the updates to complete.

I installed the Steam guide for the game I wanted to play: Red Redemption 2 (which was relatively easy to do). However, installing the Emudeck emulator required much more work.

The main issue I ran into was that using the small 7" screen without a keyboard was tricky. I found a solution by installing the following tools:

• FileZilla: to transfer files between the PC and the Steam Deck's SD Card
• AnyDesk: to access the Steam Deck using a PC 

With these tools installed, I could transfer my MAME ROMs to the Steam Deck and configure it using my PC's keyboard and mouse.

Location of ROMs on SD Card: /run/media/deck 

 

Valve Steam Deck Review

Highlights

• Easy-to-use interface to install and play all Steam games
• Fully running Linux for easy maintenance
• Support of multiple Emulators for most gaming handhelds, including Nintendo Switch, Wii, Wii U, Gameboy, and Sony PlayStation PS1, PS2, and PS3)
  
• High-performance AMD cores with a GPU allow it to run most games reasonably well
• Ability to upgrade the internal storage from 64GB to 1TB (using iFixit tools)
  
• $399 price
  

Lowlights

• Battery life is not very promising
• The 7" Screen could be better. It has a mediocre screen resolution of 1280 x 800. The iPhone has a much sharper screen with a better resolution.
  

 

Read More

Review: nVidia Shield TV

Having been an active user of Home Theater Personal Computers for many years (running Windows 7/8.1), I was looking for a front-end device that could replace the cumbersome keyboard and mouse. I prefer to have all my media on a separate NAS, like the Synology DS1815+, instead of a big, noisy PC.

My first significant replacement came with my adoption of Roku 3, which, combined with Plex, could do most of the Home Theater duties reasonably well. Roku has some limitations - it cannot play many movies directly and requires Plex to transcode many high-def films into a format it can display. Besides, it does not support speech recognition (the new version does) and is sometimes slow.

My first attempt to replace it came with my dismal attempt at using Amazon's New Fire TV. I could never open the remote's battery compartment and send it back to Amazon.

I decided to try it with a promising Nvidia Shield TV. Although I liked the idea of the new Apple TV, I did not like the fact that Apple's device did not support 4K TV standards, nor specific foreign channels like etvnet.com

During Black Friday, I noticed that Nvidia's Shield TV with remote - generally priced at $249 - was offered at $149. I decided to give it a shot.

The Shield is an Android-powered box with a nice TV remote and a gaming controller.
It had Plex and Netflix already pre-installed. It could even run Kodi (XBMC), which I used on an HTPC for many years.

Although it had fewer channels than Roku, the Shield was very responsive to button presses, and speech recognition even worked with Plex! Searching and navigation were far easier with voice. However, voice search does not work with Netflix.

I have tried a few games on the Shield, but they are not appealing yet. However, as a streaming box, the Shield is great and can replace my HTPC forever.

Read More