I remember playing one of the Zork games. It may even have been the first one. I felt like I knew what I had to do. There were a bunch of crows blocking my path. And there was a field with a scarecrow in it. And I could not figure out any command to take the scarecrow or take its clothes or do anything with it. And I was totally stuck and stopped playing the game. Not fun.

I’m genuinely surprised it still exists! I remember when you were forced to use it to get the Amazon app, or the Kindle app, or whatever. I thought it was gone years ago.

Ha, nice! Sounds about right. Something that has “become fashionable again”. Like 8-bit graphics in modern games. The prefix (hence the dash) meaning “backward” is more literal, like retrospect, which means to look back.

Napples napples napples napples!

I think they meant to say they also play Steam games on it, which I will say is a really good benefit of the Steam Deck over any of the Android handheld retro systems.

If someone’s trying to decide between a Steam Deck and a $300 Retro Handheld that can play through Game Cube, PS2, etc., I would try to convince them to buy the Steam Deck because it opens up a whole world of games.

To answer your question, yes, and I highly recommend it! The screen is huge and beautiful and it emulates games amazingly. In addition, it plays half? of the Steam library. There are so many awesome indie games and modern retro games like The Messenger that make the Steam Deck such a compelling handheld console.

My thoughts on Emudeck:

I tried Emudeck at first and ended up uninstalling it. It doesnt do anything you can’t do manually, and it did things I didn’t like.

Disclaimer, I am not a RetroArch “pro”, but I’ve been using it for decades. I know a lot of its quirks, and how to do pretty much everything.

Emudeck has these global options to let you map hotkeys, aspect ratios, and choose whether or not you want shaders enabled for consoles (CRT shaders) or handhelds (LCD shaders). Plus other things. It’s yes or no for each thing, mostly, and it will configure all emulators tonsuit your options. Not RetroArch and any standalones.

The way it configures these things in RetroArch is by saving override files. I will admit I don’t fully understand override files, but I do use preset files a lot. In any case, I was unable to save any of my custom changes in RetroArch. I would find some setting I didn’t like, or some hotkey I wanted to change because Emudeck’s default didn’t suit me, and I could change it while RA was running, but then if I tried to save my options, it wouldn’t let me because “override file in use”. That was very frustrating.

So I ended up uninstalling it and manually installing RetroArch from the app store (“Discover”). And if I needed DuckStation or some other standard-alone that worked better than RA (or a Switch emulator or something), I just installed the flatpack and confiured it myself.

You also don’t need EmuDeck to install ROM Manager which let’s you add specific ROMs to your Steam Library, although I have not done that myself yet. I don’t think it’s a killer feature, really. Not worth the effort. I just launch RetroArch where I have a Favorites menu and a History menu. I did have to manually add RetroArch to Steam which is trivially easy in desktop mode (right click the icon and click “Add to Steam”). Then I used a Decky plugin to configure art for it. Decky is awesome, BTW. It’s a whole plugin system for the Steam Deck.

In the end, EmuDeck did nothing I couldn’t do myself, and made it worse for a RetroArch power user like myself. Just my two cents.

That’s what I meant, my bad.

Galaxy is a Motorola Samsung brand. I have a Pixel 7 Pro. I don’t know if it’s limited to pixel phones. It might be.

I don’t know what phone you have, but I have a Pixel 7 Pro, and I can simply long press the home key to invoke the “Circle to Search” command, and that will identify any QR code on the screen and overlay a link that I can tap.

Yeah, I think you’re right. (No sarcasm.) I should keep such opinions to myself. I’m not at all against being a maker for the sake of making, actually. I guess I’m just a camera snob. Calling my criticism “pixel peeping” kinda set me off, and I lashed out, but that’s on me. :(

You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t have said anything. (No sarcasm.)

Haha! You don’t need to peep any pixels to see how terrible that camera is.

I’m just not into Lomo crap. Spend time with a real camera and take good photos. Tinker with your skills as a photographer and not with making toy cameras that you’re going to never use again after one roll of film.

My bad. I shouldn’t have said that.

“Awesome”

I don’t see the point when a used film camera would blow it away by a million miles.

The point is, in fact, to make something, and I shouldn’t be a camera snob.

“megashat” is the word you’re looking for.

I feel very weird calling old games that I thought of as retro “vintage” now, but I guess I have to.

Nah. Maybe? Even I call them retro games sometimes. My favorite gaming hardware YouTube channel is called “Retro Game Corps”. It what gamers call them. Depending on who I’m addressing, I use either.

Like I said in my original comment, I was mostly being pedantic. Then again, if the entire gaming world shifted to calling them “vintage games”, I’d be thrilled. Someone recently started a thread here titled “What’s your favorite vintage game?” And I did a “Not bad Obama” face and nod.

in Victoria, Australia…

Well, yeah! I expect everything be upsidedown and backwards there! 😜

Now I’m curious how the Macquarie Dictionary defines the word. I can’t search it myself because it requires a login.

When people are calling modern things they know are modern “retro”, I think it’s just a simpler form of saying “retro-style”.

“People” in general? No. Only certain gamers.

It seems like you missed the entire point of my comment, and you’re the exact kind of person I’m talking about. A person who has no idea what retro means. You are using it wrong. And by wrong I mean unlike everybody else in the world.

This is what people mean when they say retro, (except you and some other gamers):

relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned

a retro look

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retro

Saying retro style is redundant. Retro is already referring to style.

“Retro”, which to me indicates its actual age.

The word you’re looking for is “vintage”. Retro means in the style of the past.

Oh, god. I had not heard that yet, but… Ugh…

Retro means new things that look like they’re old. As in “looking backwards” for inspiration. Like pixel art. Prime example: VVVVVV.

I’m mostly being pedantic, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that gamers (and only gamers) use “retro” wrong. Every other type of collector correctly uses the word “vintage” instead: Vintage clothing, furniture, coins, wine, etc. And they use “retro” to mean new things that look old, like retro clothing. Only gamers call vintage things “retro”.

In my experience when I point this out, gamers just get mad. I don’t understand that. But I’m kind of a language nerd who watches linguistics videos for fun. And yes, I know language changes and evolves, and words mean how people use them, and dictionaries are not prescriptive, etc., etc. It’s still wrong, damnit! It’s a niche use by specific group of people that confuses everyone else because of its wrongness.

I’m going to pretend you only used that for the pause feature and taking screenshots. Otherwise, we’re going to have a problem.

– Video Game Police

This was already posted 3 hours before you.