If you want to get fancy you can add a keyboard binding to the last open back grip and the left trackpad, or even configure an 'action set' where you hold one button down to give a whole bunch of other buttons secondary keybinds. And this way there's no conflict with the controller bindings you'll want to set for each emulator. This lets you use the right trackpad as a mouse and the grip buttons on the back of the Steam Deck as your mouse clicks for navigating the emulator menus. Back grips set to Left Mouse Click, Right Mouse Click, and Middle Mouse Click.For Dolphin, PCSX2 and Bsnes, I launched the emulators and then customized a Steam controller profile to allow me to use mouse input to set things up. Of the ones I installed, Duckstation and PPSSPP have controller-friendly interfaces, so I could use the D-pad and face buttons to bounce around the menus as soon as I booted them up. You can press the Steam button + R1 to take screenshots.

The Steam menu and quick settings overlays still work.You can press the power button at any time to put the Steam Deck to sleep and your game will still work when you wake it up, even in an emulator.The Steam controller configurator provides all the extra customization you need.Most of the emulators will automatically recognize your gamepad, making input bindings easy or outright unnecessary.Most importantly, this means they can take advantage of the Steam Deck's biggest perks: Once you're back in the Steam Deck's primary interface you'll find the emulators in your library, where they more or less work like any other game.

(Image credit: Future) Using emulators in SteamOS It's built to play nice with controllers.) (One note here if you're also installing Duckstation: it has two interfaces, and 'DuckStationNoGUI' is the one you want to add to Steam.

Once I had my chosen emulators installed, I launched the desktop version of Steam and used the 'Games > Add a non-Steam game to my library' menu to add each emulator to Steam so that I could access it from the SteamOS interface. Because of the way Valve set up the partitions and file permissions on the Deck, installing emulators or any other software via the terminal is pretty locked down unless you have some serious Linux skills. The best bit is that these aren't just one-off executables you're installing-when new builds of the emulators are released, you can update with a single click, too. There are some other emulators available in Discover, too, including mGBA for the Game Boy Advance and Citra for the 3DS.

Bsnes emulator review