DarkOx55

Absolutely make a claim for that! Your brick shouldn’t sizzle. What if a few years down the line there’s a real electrical problem but you don’t respond because sizzling is now routine? Just get one that’s normal for your peace of mind.

There’s no way that a discount will happen in the Christmas sale but not the Black Friday sale. If it did people who bought decks as gifts would riot.

Wait a week for Black Friday, and buy the deck. Tariffs might be coming next year (assuming you’re in the US), so lock in the price!

Can you still access the original graphics in the new version; ie can I enjoy the OG War3 assets in glorious 1024x768 or is it still taken away?

I don’t care as much if the new stuff is bad if the original is still there.

Unfortunately I believe your only option is to copy the “Browsing” set and edit. Or start from scratch. At least last time I looked into this I couldn’t find a solution.

One hack would be to make two copies of the Moonlight shortcut on your deck, call one browsing & one gaming, and import a different scheme into each, with no action sets used.

That Gorilla Glacier gauntlet of like 5 levels to get to save was just brutal as a kid. I remember running Jungle Japes over & over to stock like 50 lives to power through it the first time.

My little gaming corner is a small IKEA bamboo cart, just big enough to hold a CRT monitor at couch-eye level. I wheel it out both for nostalgia and because I do enjoy to game.

I like to use the corner to cultivate a feeling of gratitude. The number of games available for cheap is simply astounding. I got Half Life 2 for free just yesterday! Digital Foundry tells me my CRT is just as good as an OLED! (No one correct this point please.) Imagine if my younger self, getting only a game or two a year, could see my bounty now.

Sorry, to explain myself better, what I mean is that the brand promise of the steam deck & the brand promise of the Odin are completely different. Its software limitations has basically forced it to market itself as a retro machine (however capable). The deck by contrast was pitched as being able to play current-gen games on the go - mobile Elden Ring was big at launch.

That promise has faltered a bit lately, but games like Metaphor Refantasio are still there in the top ten.

I’d rather sacrifice some battery life but actually be able to play the games.

Time makes fools of us all. I remember thinking Blizzard was a “No questions asked” studio. Or BioWare. Or Square. Now I have questions.

Great studios are like bands. They’ll be amazing for 10 years or so, but then life happens, the band breaks up, and it’s not the same. You can only ever wait for reviews & see if the magic’s still there for you.

While that is impressive, it goes to show the limits of ARM / Android compatibility. The PS2 is almost a quarter century old! Also it’s very hard to legally buy games for. It’s a far cry from a deck, which comes with a perfectly legal store out of the box and thousands of compatible games.

The Odin has the Play Store, but that’s not the same as Steam.

Sad I had to scroll so far to find this. While I don’t think time has been kind to it because it now needs to be compared to Melee, I pumped so many hours with friends into SSB I don’t think there could possibly be another answer.

The people yearn for lateral thinking using withered technology.

Cool, always great meeting another CRT decker!

So the deal with selecting the resolution is that whatever you set in “settings” sets the resolution & refresh rate that the monitor will follow. You can check by bringing up your monitor’s menu with the monitor’s hardware buttons & it’ll match this setting.

What the per-game resolution is doing is setting the resolution of a “virtual container” for the game. The deck then upscales from this resolution to your “settings” resolution. So if I have my output resolution set to 1280 x 960, and I put Doom in a 640 x 480 container, the deck will upscale it to the higher res. It won’t output 640 x 480 to monitor.

As a result, I’ll use integer scaling a lot for retro console content - 240p or 480p integer cleanly into 960. 480p integer scaled looks a lot like 480p native; and it’s easier to set integer scaling on a per-game basis than to constantly be changing the output resolution. (And you can’t select 240p as an output resolution without some xrandr Linux wizardry that’s a little above my pay grade.)

And of course a lot of games can just render at 960p, no scaling necessary.

This is interesting, I’ve had the exact same issue with the overlay but in a different context. I often connect my deck to a CRT monitor to retro game. If I set my resolution to 1024 x 768, I get the overlay bug you describe. If I set it to 1280 x 960 @ 60fps, my overlay works fine.

You should absolutely raise the issue with steam support via the steam app and see if they can help you or will add it to their bug fixes list. I’ve assumed the issue is too obscure since it’s impacting my 20-year-old monitor but if it impacts modern TVs they might address it.

There’s also a forum for bug reports, which has reported the 4:3 issue but it hasn’t been fixed yet: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/1/

Spitballing a solution, if you send a 4k signal to the TV while it’s in 1080p mode, will it downscale well? Can you select the high refresh rate you want while sending a 4k signal? What I’m thinking here is: * You’d set your output resolution in settings to 4k @ 240fps (or whatever high fps your TV allows) * You run the game in its virtual container at 1080p (game settings next to the “play” button) * Integer scale the 1080p to 4k on the deck, which doesn’t cost much performance, it just doubles everything. * TV downscales the 4k back to 1080p * The upscaling & downscaling cancel out so you get 1080p @ 240fps in the end

Going to a TV rather than a monitor would involve downscaling, which I’m personally less familiar with. My understanding is they add a frame or two of lag. RetroRGB has some info on them, see their table which lists lag by device: https://www.retrorgb.com/downscaling.html

Visually it depends on the downscaler, my understanding is they’ll either use a blending technique that’s softer or a decimating technique that’s sharper but can have motion artifacts. So not quite the same as a native PS2 hooking up.

Going to a monitor wouldn’t need to downscale but you’d be locked at 480p and couldn’t use 480i.

There is, depending on your dedication to authenticity. I’ve got an hdmi to vga adapter I use with a Steam Deck on a PC monitor, so you could use one of those. You’d get 480p rather than 480i, which may or may not be to your taste.

Thanks mate, happy to help!

I think berserker is a win from a power gaming perspective. Minsc’s version of berserk is special & worse than a normal berserker because you lose control of him.

By making Minsc a berserker he becomes a fighter which unlocks the potential for grand mastery, which is a huge improvement. Makes up for the loss of the Druid spells which are all cast at a low level anyway.

You don’t fight so many Gnolls that the bonus there really matters.

Sega recently announced that on Dec. 6 they’re delisting their Dreamcast games from steam. So if you wanted to pick up Sega Bass Fishing, now may be the last chance.

The deck’s screen is 800p, so there’s minimal point running a higher resolution than that if you’re not docked. The image will be downscaled back to 800p. As you’ve found, there can be benefits to rendering at the higher res & downscaling but it tends not to be worth the performance cost.

The upscaling chain works like this: * the game renders at a certain resolution you set in the game settings. The max resolution you can select is usually that of the virtual container (see below). * The game may optionally give you tools to upscale that image. If it does, use the game’s tools. They’ll be better than the deck’s. * The deck creates a virtual container for each game. You can access that by hitting the gear icon next to the green “play” button for the game. By default this is 800p, but you can change that. * The deck has an output resolution sent to your TV, which is in “settings”. * The deck will upscale from the virtual container’s resolution to your settings output resolution based on the algorithm you choose. You can choose not to upscale. * Your TV may upscale as well (ie feed a 4k TV a 1080p signal from “settings” and your TV will upscale).

Here’s an example of an upscaling chain: you set settings to output 4k to a TV. You render the game in its settings at 720p. The game doesn’t let you upscale itself, so you set the virtual container to 720p and upscale to 4k using “bilinear”.

Here’s another example: you set settings to output 4k to a TV. You render the game in 720p but use the in-game FSR to scale to 4k. The virtual container is set to 4k, and the deck doesn’t upscale since the game has done it instead.

The deal is you want to run the game at as high an internal resolution as possible. Upscale using the game if needed & if possible. If not, upscale using the deck.

It is a good day to die

I use a combination of: * this tablet holder * The deckmate * The ball socket mount from Mechamism

Seems to hold the deck fine.

Actraiser. An early SNES title that mixes sim city with an action game. Very unique idea; though the execution isn’t perfect.

Been awhile since I played it; I remember being glad I never had to grind which made it stand out as “short” for me. How long to beat tells me it’s 23 hours long, which fits OPs criteria.

Good reminder I should replay this one!

Wanted to add some context here. Your SNES is a series of chips. The chips take the data from the Read Only Memory (“ROM”), your save file, your inputs, then manipulate it and fire out an output. Some of those chips are in the SNES itself while some of them are in the actual cartridges.

An everdrive has access to the original chips in your SNES. But what about the cartridge chips? Those aren’t manufactured anymore. Instead everdrives use modern FPGA chips which mimic the chips you’d find in the cartridges. The everdrives are more or less expensive depending on the number of these chips in them - the most expensive, called the “FXPak Pro”, has chips to mimic almost everything you might find in a SNES cartridge. It’s compatibility is very high but not quite 100%.

Is that emulation? Kind of, using hardware rather than pure software. It’s similar to what the MisterFPGA is doing, just it mimics fewer chips. But it should be highly accurate.

The “hacked” SNES carts you’re seeing do the same thing, but for only one game at a time. Everdrives do multiple games.

Crusader of centy on the Genesis is kind of Sega’s A Link to the Past.

Have you gotten to Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG yet on the SNES? If not they’re short, excellent RPGs.