I just plugged the steam deck in to a monitor and while I was transferring some roms and started to wonder if it would be feasible to use as a day to day computer while docked.

I fought with prime hack for a while trying to get it to work. I was using the GameCube Metroid prime 2 iso.

It loaded fine, but I could not get the controller mapped correctly.

I discovered that there is a Wii Metroid prime trilogy iso.

I tried this one and then suddenly everything worked perfectly.

The on screen button icons even matched the steam deck instead of showing the GameCube button.

I hope this helps as it’s a great series and it deserves to be played through primehack.

Love the SteamDeck and looking for some good Multiplayer games that feel right on the SD. I find FPS games don’t translate well for me with the keyboard -> controller style jump. So far love Diablo 4 when it comes to MP.

If you are like me you want to be able to adjust your logitec/steelseries/asus (among other) mouse settings within the deck itself while in desktop mode.

There’s a great utility for doing this called libratbag. It can not be packaged as a flatpack so you will have to install it manually with Pacman. Due to the nature of how the deck’s os is configured, you will have to redo this every time your deck updates, but it’s super simple! You will need to have set a sudo password to do this, so if you have not done that go ahead and get that out of the way.

Instructions:

Launch Konsole

sudo steamos-readonly disable sudo pacman -S libratbag sudo pacman-key --init sudo pacman -Syy sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux sudo steamos-readonly enable

Congratulations! Libratbag is now installed! The next step is to install a GUI to control libratbag, this program is called piper. Luckily this is a flatpack, and available in the discover app located on the toolbar while in desktop mode. Just search for piper there and install it. This process will not need to be repeated after each update. After it installs launch it and you are free to adjust your mouse’s settings!

A heads up- I am a script kiddie at best. This works for me, so it should work for you. If it doesn’t, I’m probably not going to be able to troubleshoot this further, but I can try.

Hopefully this is the right place to post this, if not let me know

Hey SteamDeck’ers, As we're all aware that Valve broke Remote Play on SteamDeck and hasn't fixed it yet. I'm seeing lots of people having their sound cut off few minutes into streaming, or having lots of ghost input with bluetooth controllers.

However, there are two other options that work well, and sometimes even better than Remote Play.

First, if you're using SteamDeck with a TV and have an Android or Apple TV, consider using the Steam Link app instead. It's still great!

Second, you can use Moonlight to stream directly to SteamDeck. Find Moonlight in Discover (SteamOS desktop appstore) in Desktop mode. Installing it is just that easy.

You will also need to install Sunshine, the Server counterpart as well on your PC.

Moonlight is a great replacement to NVIDIA's now retired GameStream and works with any GPU with the help of Sunshine. In fact, it offers smoother visuals compared to Steam Remote Play, also offers HDR support on supported TVs.

Happy streaming!

Hello,

Steam Deck had a small update last night and it completely broke the game controls. I am using the Daimyo Valheim v3 layout, which is maps everything to keyboard and mouse keys. Since the update, the on screen keyboard doesnt come up when trying to interact with a sign to change the text, and if you go into the map to try and create a pin with text, it completely breaks. You can’t exit the map most of the time but if you do, your character can’t move and most of the controls stop working.

Anyone have any ideas how to resolve, or if this issue was seen previously?

I had 6 hours of trouble last night and thought I'd share this information with you as many people will be doing the same. So here's the story:

My girlfriend bought a SteamDeck in the summer sale and I told her to get the cheapest one and upgrade the ssd as soon as it arrived. For 2 days everything worked fine. Swapping from 64GB to 512GB worked perfectly and installing SteamOS on the new drive was no problem at all.

While I was at work, she texted me that the deck was getting very laggy in games and in the UI itself, so I asked her if she had already rebooted or set any kind of tdp or performance limit (which she denied).

So she rebooted her machine from the laggy ui and it got stuck with the boot logo. After a few minutes it went black, the backlight was still on and the fan stopped.

When I got home, I reinstalled steamos for her from the usb stick we made a few days ago (went for the reimage). I tried to boot, but the same problem occurred. After a few minutes it went to the TTY login screen and asked for a user, but the cursor froze immediately. I also tried to switch TTY sessions with ctrl - alt - f4-f6 - but that did not work either.

So I flashed the USB stick again, but nothing changed. Then I deleted all partitions manually and nothing changed. I booted my windows sd card which worked fine. So I thought maybe the SSD was broken, so I went into recovery live boot with "smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1" to check, but everything seemed fine.

I also filled the whole SSD with zeros and tried again. Nothing.

I searched a lot and somehow found this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/3410930083331964510/

Exactly the problem I was facing and I could not believe the comment the user "Healer" (https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198835118084) wrote:

Same problem. It's weird, but it was solved by putting the battery in power saving mode: Enter the BIOS at power up (Power + Vol+) with the PSU disconnected. Inside the BIOS, use the D-pad to navigate and the A-button to select. Navigate to Setup Utility. Navigate to the Power menu. Select Battery Backup Mode. Select Yes to confirm. Your Steam Deck should now enter storage mode.

Then plug in the power supply and switch on the deck.

In my case, it booted correctly.

I know it's weird, but it actually worked.

Good luck with that!

And my fucking God, that thing fixed it. I have no idea why that would fix it and I'm happy for anyone who can explain it to me. I'm fucking curious :D

And my fucking God, that thing fixed it. I have no idea why that would fix it and I'm happy for anyone who can explain it to me. I'm fucking curious :D

I was watching this video the other day and our friend Bob made a comment about the steamdecks trackpads, essentially calling the bad. I want to know what the community thinks.

For me, they are a game changer. They are not the best implemented trackpads I've ever seen but on a handheld it made a world of difference setting up any desktop software like emudeck, and any of the associated emulators. Civ games in my opinion are easier to navigate and I would be hard pressed to try to play any type of RTS game without them. Not to mention that after a year of having the Deck, I just learned how to comfortably type with them. I've bound them to be a radial dial of tools within games and with the desktop mode.

This morning I heard of the Aya Neo Kun, a 75 watt hour x86 handheld with trackpads. Outside the GDP WIN 4 with it's physical keyboard this is the only other x86 handheld I think I could consider using. I believe its physical trackpads would help me navigate the nightmare that is windows 11. I will always prefer a mouse and keyboard but on the go, they've been a handy tool to getting things done.

Love em, hate em, or just don't care about em, I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Added the jsaux backplate and stuck a 40mm heat sink on the plate to help with passive cooling, not sure how much it helps but the fan is quieter so I’m happy with it!

So far, the information available on the Steam Deck screws has been sparse, while many people attempting to modify or maintain the Steam Deck noted their fragile nature. So during my recent opening of the Steam Deck, I decided to collect some technical information on screws that are otherwise not written down anywhere.

Types of Screws and their Propensity of Stripping

Most of the screws used in the Steam Deck have been noted as M1.6 (metric with a diameter of 1.6 mm), though below, I will be precise that these may not apply everywhere. There are two types of screws involved, machine screws (metal-to-metal contact) and plastic self-tapping (metal-to-plastic).

M1.6 machine screws will have a rigidly standardized pitch of 0.35 mm (ISO 7045:2011), often written in short as M1.6-0.35. The M1.6 self-tapping screws seem to have often a pitch of 0.64 mm, which some vendor references as a JIS standard (which I have no visibility into, but see, e.g., https://www.newstarfastenings.com/uploads/Brochure.pdf on page 29), whereas the M1.5 self-tapping pitch of 0.5 mm is defined in ISO 1478:1999.

The back screws are described in the following:

https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/SteamDeck/hardware/-/blob/master/steamdeck_2d_20220202.pdf

Measuring their pitch and lengths shows they are consistent with being:

• M1.6-0.64×8.7mm (9.5 mm total length), pan headed for the longer self-tapper and
• M1.6-0.35×5mm (5.8 mm total length), (thickish) wafer headed for the shorter machine screw.

Note iFixit only lists the total length, whereas you mostly need the thread length, which is the value after the “×” sign, when looking for replacement screws. I am not going into great detail about these, as OEM replacement screws are readily available.

Valve customer support revealed the specification of the two small machine screws at the top and bottom left of the EMI shield to someone inquiring about it (I added the head shape):

• M1.6-0.35×3mm, pan headed

(total length 3.7 mm, https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/730764/). I do not recall an official statement on the large EMI shield screw underneath the foil, but in the eXtremeRate front plate kit, there is one screw shared between this and the SSD. Hence this is likely the standard machine screw as with the SSD:

• M2-0.4×2.5mm, wafer headed, head diameter 4.5 mm

Three self-tapping screws of a more mysterious origin attach to each analog stick. There are 28 screws of this type in a Steam Deck. Yet no source seems to have ever named the specification of this screw. And my inquiries with Valve customer support got the response that they do not know (and have no vendor they want to reveal). My measurements suggest

• In between M1.55-0.5×4.5mm and M1.55-0.55×4.5mm (total length 5.2 mm), wafer headed, head height 0.7 mm, head diameter 3.5 mm

These are very custom screws and are virtually impossible to obtain.

The best replacement I found is the ones that come with eXtremeRate front plate kit, which is 0.17-0.64×4.5mm, and a head with the same dimension as the OEM screw. As they have a larger M1.7 size, these screws will hopefully re-tap their threads further into the plastic. Empirically I found them to hold well. And these screws from eXtremeRate have far deeper Phillips slots than the OEM screws, making them significantly more stripping resistant.

Note that while scary (and do not do it unless necessary), in the worst case, there are two methods to fix the tapped or stripped holes: Using epoxy like J-B Weld, see, e.g., over at r/consolerepair (https://www.reddit.com/r/consolerepair/comments/rg3oec/repair_screw_plastic/), or you could also replace the front cover and therefore tapping completely fresh using your favorite screw thread.

I included figures showing the comparison between the screws and how they compare once inserted.

Appropriate Torque

Laptop manufacturers often supply the design screw torques in their maintenance or field service manuals. Upon my inquiries, neither Valve customer support (who referred to iFixit) nor iFixit could provide the screw torques for the Steam Deck. And self-tapping screws usually have empirical torques determined using failure analysis (screw until the plastic breaks) that only the manufacturer/ODM would know.

Therefore I applied the torque auditing method by loosening on a pristine (never opened) Steam Deck to independently determine the screw torques during the assembly process in the factory. These are as follows:

• Back M1.6×9mm: 10 cN·m (14 ozf·in)
• Back M1.6×5mm: 8 cN·m (11 ozf·in) — the initial loosening torques were a bit ambiguous, and this was rechecked by re-tightening and reproducing the loosening torques
• Shield small: 10 cN·m (14 ozf·in)
• Shield/foil and SSD: 16 cN·m (23 ozf·in)
• Stick: 6 cN·m (8 ozf·in) if reusing the OEM screws, or 10–14 cN·m (14–20 ozf·in) when re-tapping with M1.7

The OEM stick screws are fragile and tend to strip with a slightly misaligned screwdriver above a torque τ = 10 cN·m. Hence the recommendation is to stick to 6 cN·m if the screw is reused. Also, these screws appear to have QA markings with red Loctite, which can artificially increase the loosening torque to around 10 cN·m. This low threshold further explains why many people ended up stripping these screws.

During my re-tapping with M1.7 screws, 5 out of the 6 stick screws could be re-tapped with τ = 10 cN·m, and the last one required 14 cN·m. Both values indicate that a healthy amount of friction is retained, not indicative of the tapped grooves being stripped.

Note on the Appropriate Phillips Bit

Annoyingly, iFixit would not provide any concrete advice on bit sizes. Instead, it says, “Phillips screwdrivers can vary in size and shape,” which is true. However, it is quite possible to check bits for the correct size.

The Phillips/cross recess H is defined in ISO 4757:1983 Section 2.1. Among the parameters in Table 1, the recess width f is the easiest to check for small bits. The correct bit should be ISO No. 0, sometimes denoted “PH0.” In the ISO standard, No. 0 has f = 0.31–0.36 mm, and, e.g., when I checked, the Wiha Slotted Torque Control Blade PH0 measures 0.35 mm.

A free copy of ISO 4757:1983 is e.g., in https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S01/is.7478.2011.pdf

Note on Torque Auditing and Uncertainties

When using the loosening method, the conventionally used estimate for the ratio of measured torque/tightening torque = 0.6–0.9, with a mean = 0.8. For simplicity, 0.8 is used, with a ± 20% uncertainty relative. See, e.g., explained by Tohnichi:

https://www.tohnichi.com/pdf/03-inspecting-tightening-torque.pdf

Additionally, the Tohnichi dial torque meter has a manufacturer-specified uncertainty of ± 3% relative. This meter was cross-calibrated against the Wiha TorqueVario-S 4–46 cN·m driver, which has a manufacturer-specified uncertainty of ± 10% relative. Cross-calibrating both devices yielded an additional possible uncertainty source of ± (0.8 cN·m) / τ relative (τ being the torque), which can be from the indicator needle’s inertia and finite scale reading resolution.

The plots in the figure show the estimated tightening torque with uncertainties as error bars, their joint distribution assuming Gaussians as the curve, and the 68% Student’s t confidence interval of the tightening torque as a shaded area.

Raw Torque Measurements

Units in cN·m, annotated by screw length.

Back top (left to right)
- 9.5mm
4.2 5.8mm
6.3 5.8mm
8.5 9.5mm

Back bottom (left to right)
7.7 9.5mm
3.5 5.8mm
- 5.8mm
7.8 9.5mm

Shield (top to bottom)
8.2 3.7mm
14.3 3.4mm
9.7 3.7mm

SSD
12.9 3.4mm

Stick R (top to bottom)
5.7
7.4
- (10.8 but Loctite)

Stick L (top to bottom)
6.3
7.2
7.0

Trigger bracket R (top to bottom)
8.6
-
8.3

Edit: More copy-editing and some rephrasing for clarity.

Has anyone tried the Watchdog series on the steam deck? How does it run?