Pretty cool, especially for android based handhelds.

Another similar project is Gamenative, which I’ve been using some. It’s worked well in my testing.

Yeah, when I upgraded my Deck’s m.2 drive to 1tb I used cloning as well, but it was mainly just because I didn’t want to reinstall all my games/emulators/plugins/etc. Definitely worked smoothly to do it that way.

Thanks for sharing, hopefully it will help someone.

From reading on the issue, it may be a timeout during a large TRIM operation. With larger drives, you can have large scale TRIM operations fail for a couple reasons, but it mostly comes down to the volume of the requested consecutive operations being more than the NVME drive’s controller can handle in one go, or more than it can handle within the typical 30 second timeout window for these commands.

If it was this, you could either temporarily disable trim for the drive before running the install, or possibly tweak the mkfs commands in the install script to include the nodiscard option.

Yeah SteamOS is read only anyways, so you could skip the systems part of the bwrap command when using it on steamOS.

As for games inside proton, they have full access to your files mounted as a Z: drive iirc. So it’s possible for them to mess with your files, if the dev prepares for it.

I’m playing 2nd chapter right now, and yeah it’s such a great QoL feature. It’s a real shame more games don’t do something similar.

Just for the security part of it, you can isolate steam games from your file system. Some people prefer flatpak steam on regular linux because you can easily block it’s access to system/user files and only let it access steam files and library directories.

For steamOS, you can create a fake home folder and add a bwrap command to the launch options, which will set system files as read only and only let it have direct access to the fake home folder.

A recent steamOS update said it was laying the foundation for hibernation, which should be a more battery friendly alternative to sleep.

The second part depends on the game, some will just work. Others need to run a first launch script and install some stuff before launch, which I agree should be part of the download process. Finally some games require license check or additional network access on first launch while the game is running, and this part can’t be automated by valve. Overall it’s just a good habit to always run newly installed games once, at least long enough to get to the main menu.

Do not plug the dongle directly into your motherboard USB ports. It REALLY does not like the noisy RF of the motherboard. If possibly, use a USB extension cable to let it sit a bit away from the PC.

Does this apply to all motherboard USB ports or just USB 3 ports?

USB 3 ports are well known to cause interference with wireless devices.

Did you mean to comment that on this post? I think you probably wanted to try one of the recent Frame posts.

Good post, I’m pinning it to the community for awhile.

Lately I’ve been playing Trails in the Sky 2nd chapter. I had never played the trails series before 1st chapter’s remake last year, and they’re pretty fantastic, highly recommended for JRPG fans.

I also played Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Really fun, and had a good time with it. My only real complaint is that the difficulty scaling felt kinda off, especially at the beginning everything was far too easy, and then the difficulty ramps up kinda unevenly. Still really fun though, all the boss fights especially were great.

Maybe it can be used to make a one-handed layout for mindless grind games or something, idk

That’s kinda a cool idea, I like the idea of having a 1 handed control layout for grinding in JRPGs that it switches to automatically when I’m only holding the controller with one hand.

That’s pretty interesting, I hadn’t ever considered using thumbstick touch to disable gyro. I could definitely see an advantage there for having the grip sensor.

(e.g. using a healing item while bravely running away).

In games where the dpad is used to heal, I usually always bind one of the back grip buttons to it for this exact reason

This is mostly meant to make it easier to install software from a separate PC vs having to install it from the Frame itself. That said, it is installing the software into steam as a steam dev build, which goes beyond the usual “add a non-steam application”. I’m also not sure if users can add Android APKs to steam yet (to be run with Steam’s Lepton), but this will allow that.

This app is specifically installing software using devkit tools, and registering games to Steam as a devkit game rather than an external application.

There’s also been some question on how easy it will be for users to add Android APKs. It may be as simple as picking the Lepton compatibility layer, or it may be only available to devs atm. Either way this is the first thing I’ve seen that’s saying users can definitely install their own android apps.

I ended up dropping CSS loader because it was one of the most common things to break with beta updates, but I’ve really missed that look. So it’s super exciting to be getting it back.

Oh that’s tempting, they’ve been teasing the CoQ mobile version forever now (7+ years?), and I’ve always wanted to play it on the go. I’ve got it on my Deck always, but I need good game on my phone much more than on my deck.

To be honest it was a weird hole in my gaming history. I’ve played later Castlevania’s, and I’ve always been a huge Metroid fan.

I think I’m largely judging it by comparing it to Super Metroid. Both games were ones I returned to after playing newer titles in their series (mainly on GBA and DS).

Playing SotN for the first time, I find it good, but it feels like it hasn’t held up as well as super metroid. When I went back and played super Metroid for the first time, I found it to be a great metroid game with slightly outdated controls. Going back to SotN after playing newer Castlevania games has felt rougher. SM is famous for how it guides players with an invisible hand, but SotN progression often seems more obscure, I’ve been trying to play without guides, and while I’m doing great at finding health/heart upgrades, I’ve been struggling to find the actual abilities for progression. The game also likes destroyable ceilings/floors for a game that doesn’t give great options for attacking up or down.

Anyways it’s good, I’m enjoying it, but playing it with no nostalgia and no prior knowledge on patching/puzzles has involved a lot of meandering around the map.

I’m still mostly playing Dragonsword Awakening. Really fun game, and a great value for it’s asking price. Plus the devs have been quick to patch bugs (including steam deck specific bugs) and add in quality of life changes. There’s also a lot of free content updates planned.

Also have been playing through Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Pretty good game, although I had to look up advice on some of the puzzles/breakable walls I missed.

I’m holding off on getting into any other games that are too large at the moment, want to make sure I’m not tied up when Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter releases later this month.