my steam deck was also turned into a master system, nes, snes, genesis, psx, n64, and game gear too
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
157 points (98.8% liked)
Steam Hardware
22887 readers
158 users here now
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
A trackpad on a gameboy-like device is a cool idea
Why? No game is going to make use of it. Would you remap it to face buttons or something?
I guess if you used the device to emulate PS1 games or the like, that could come in handy to act as a joystick or something. Or if it had a Steam Deck-like desktop mode.
Sometimes you just gotta build something just to see if you can, not because of any inherent utilitarian value.
Also, having a trackpad built into a Gameboy is indeed cool. I don't have to use the d-pad to parse menus if I don't want to, I can also use it like a joystick even if it's probably inferior to the OG controller scheme.
PS Vita had a touchpad on the back, you could use it similarly.
I still remember the magazine ad about that
Steam Boy
Gabe Boy
Honestly I'm so sick of it being called the "GabeCube", partly because it's too close to GameCube phonetically that it actually sounds pretty much identical to GameCube in most cases, but moreso because it's the result of the hard work of so many talented and passionate engineers at Valve, it feels really disrespectful to call it after the businessman who funded it.
It's an amusing pun, I enjoyed hearing/reading it the first time. Second time onwards it's just annoying.
If they were to sell it with that name officially, Nintendo would likely complain. But its just a fun name from the community, so no harm no foul. Though I can see your perspective on this.
Yeah, I know that it's just a nickname people gave it, like "Wiimote" for the Wii Remote which caused trouble for the Weemote but was obviously not Nintendo's responsibility. But as I said, it's a kinda-funny meme description of what the Steam Machine is, I get annoyed when people actually use it as a nickname for it in conversation or videos.
Hang on a sec...
Ok, I'm ready to play this thing.
Ghostbuster's II throwback!
Love the execution, though the loss of the second thumbstick would be a bit painful for certain titles. I'm fortunate to own the original Steam Controller, and using a trackpad as the right thumbstick is not great.
Still, this would be great as an emulation machine or any game that allows mouse and controller input at the same time!
Yeah, no second stick would be rough... but it would be ideal for PSP emulation!
I wonder if you can buy these as replacement parts instead of having to buy a full steam deck. Really cool
It uses a Steam Deck motherboard, which isn't available as a replacement part, so you'd have to have a full deck. It might be a good option for steam decks with a broken screen though, since that part is completely replaced.
Except the screen doesn't work (yet)
A valid point
Yep, and I bet you could find those on eBay or similar second-hand sale sites.
I recoiled reading the title but seeing the form factor in action it does look awesome!
Ok this is really cool
Maybe in the future a smaller version of a Steam Deck could be possible, based on ARM, as ARM is more energy efficient and smaller. Valve is supporting FEX (an x86-64 to ARM64 emulator / translator) and the Steam Frame is based on ARM that can play your Steam library too. I would love to have a small Steam Boy thing. :-) In fact I would be even happy if its weaker than the Steam Deck!
And if VALVE is not doing this, some other company might using SteamOS. But not in this economy.
Thats basically gamehub on android. There's other forks of it that arent as shitty but I still don't really intend on using it outside of checking up on progress every now and then. I think gamehub is gamesir the company that locks their switch emulator based off stolen code, and requiring physically for you to use one of their controllers. So I don't like the idea of them in general, even ignoring the privacy issues.
But I do hope that steam os becomes popular for this. If I understand it correctly the frame is going to run off arch64 and use a combo of android, and fex translation layers so it will be extreamly versatile. Right now one of the closes things I experienced is Ubuntu touch, but you have to do everything in libertine containers and even native Linux apps don't always work well, along with waydroid.
The progress with fex is already impressive and if it matures anything like proton did, it might be just as simple. I can throw a pirated Photoshop 1.6 cs or something into bottles with proton ge and it works. Sure might not be the version anyone wants anymore but I can say "we have Photoshop" now.
Even if people don't use steam is directly I think there will be community made projects that essentially just bundle in almost the same experience using the same tools valve is using. Kinda like how bazzite or cachyos make it easy to have a steam deck experience out of the box and focuses on more gaming specific utilities that the steam deck comes bundled with.
And its not going to be good right away. Proton kind of sucked when the the first steam decks where released. It has to be out there and start getting put through the paces, people need to be making reports on protondb, etc. When I got a q2 steam deck it was pretty much only the indie games and native Linux games that worked fine. Outside of that it didnt work or there was actual fiddling you had to do, and protonGE was more nessisary to use over proton.
The hardest part is everyone needs universal hardware. The os would have to be made for a few select phones, because with these bundles of translation layers like gamehub its a lot of tweaking and toggling on and off stuff that you don't always fully know what it does or understand why you need it. Sometimes you have a shitty processor so you have to toggle a different series of settings to get them to work with your hardware, and the experience isnt always going to be the same.
If you are interacting with Gamehub (proprietary), then I would look into Gamehub-lite (the patches are Open Source on top of the proprietary original): https://github.com/Producdevity/gamehub-lite
GameHub Lite is a modified version of GameHub that:
- Removes telemetry and tracking - Umeng analytics, Firebase, JPush, crash reporting
- Removes bloat - Cloud Streaming, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Social features, etc.
- Removes account requirement - Use the app without logging in
- Reduces app size - From 118MB to 52MB (-56%)
- Removes unnecessary permissions - Location, contacts, phone state, etc.
- Adds offline support - Works without constant network connectivity
- Changes package name - gamehub.lite for side-by-side installation
- Adds custom news page - Uses community API for updates
https://gamenative.app/ - And then there is GameNative, which is entirely Open Source. Some say that the GameHub devs stealing code or ideas from GameNative, because its suspicious whenever they have a new feature, it only takes very short amount of time for GameHub to do it too. But nobody knows. So I would personally recommend GameNative instead.
I personally didn't experiment with ARM yet, outside Raspberry Pie 3B and that is ages ago (10 years...). And off course phones. The Steam Frame is really something else and more than just VR. I'm surprised it will have Android app support. Maybe Valve plans on adding an Android category that is not VR related? But I guess developers would need to release and upload their games to this shop, similar to how they do it on Google or F-Droid. This is highly speculative from my part BTW, there are no words about that. Valve tried to expand into films too, which would have been something like Amazon Prime videos or like that. BTW I would love to watch a film in VR.
Android support is to run the apks that the meta quests use to play natively, sense they just use a modified version of android they're pretty much mobile phones already.
But yes this does mean steam is adding support for apks technically. I just don't know if that means we will get steam on android. It just means that for sure they are allowing developers to choose to let you run the apk or the scaled version of the PC version.
Most likely the PC versions are going to run worse for a good while, but this is when it will it will start to improve the most.
Technically sense the steam frame runs on arm its technically native but because its on arch64 they will need something like waydroid if that's not what they are already using.
Also I've used both of those forks I think, I don't remember which one I prefer I have to relearn everything everytime I tinker with it. I don't really use those apps but when I get new phones or arm based gaming handhelds I gotta put it through the ringer first to see what it can do.
the steam frame runs on arm its technically native but because its on arch64 they will need something like waydroid
Steam Frame uses Lepton, which is a fork of Waydroid (similar to how Proton is a fork of WINE).
Yeah that's amazing thats another translation layer thats vital for Linux phones.
Thats what im getting excited about. If someone makes use of all this progress we could have decent capable smart phones that at the very least have all the attractive software and apps which is the hardest part.
Sure getting the actual phone elements to work is still hard but we have a few options already and the main issue with those, is that no ones going to adopt it because they can't use messenger or play candy crush anymore. They're just boring phones again, and unless you find it fun writting code or playing in the terminal, it gets boring fast. Being able to play skyrim on your phone makes it sound like a fair trade off in some regards. People might be more willing to change their other habits and apps they used if there was at least one solid source of dopamine. I don't know if you guys noticed but every app is basicially made to hijack your reward center, and switching to a privacy phone is like quiting smoking cold turkey.
Just to use YouTube like a normal person on newpipe I have to change my IP every couple of hours when YouTube bans me. So much of privacy focused experience is becoming that as these big companies push out anyone who isnt signed into a I'D verified account, and stuff like that is painful to do for the average person. I'm filled with spite so I will do everything in my power to make it harder to collect my data, but most people aren't like that. There's gotta be SOMETHING that gives privacy phones some hype, or momentum.
And people joke Valve does nothing and wins. How on earth are they doing nothing? :D BTW I'm using FreeTube and its annoying how often I have to change IP too (thank god VPNs). And the buffering issues and so on on top of it, I have to copy the link to separate video player an watch it there... YouTube got unbearable!
This is gonna be a deeeeeeep cut but this reminds me of the Game Grrl from ladyada way back in the day.
HRT for gaming handhelds be like
Face buttons in wrong configuration for a Nintendo system. Immersion ruined.