[Sticky] EmuDeck vs Batocera vs RetroDeck vs EmulationStation

Let’s take a quick look at some of your emulation options on the Steam Deck.

EmuDeck is a tool that integrates many functions into one: it will download emulators from their official sources, pre-configure your settings and hotkeys, and work together with EmulationStation and the Steam ROM Manager. It’s not an “app” in the strictest sense, but a collection of clever scripts that take care of all the manual installation and configuration for you. I’ve seen some concerns about allowing an app to install items on your Steam Deck, but EmuDeck does not require sudo/root access to work, and only installs the same file systems that you would be installing if you installed the emulators manually. However, if you’d rather have a self-contained solution, check out Batocera or RetroDeck.

Batocera is a custom Linux operating system that is focused on game emulation. It is completely self-contained and bootable from a variety of formats. This means you can load Batocera on a microSD card, flash drive, or external hard drive and boot it from there. As an example, you could use your Steam Deck primarily for PC games, and when you are ready to do some emulation, you can just add the Batocera SD card, boot into the card, and start playing games. This is an excellent setup if you want to separate your SteamOS PC gaming experience and your retro game emulation.

RetroDeck is an all-in-one emulation solution that uses EmulationStation as its main interface. Because it is self-contained, it will behave as a single app with all of its emulators pre-installed and configured. This is a great solution if you just want a simple emulation experience that you can access directly from your SteamOS environment. Moreover, the app is available as a FlatPak directly in the Discover app via Desktop Mode on your Steam Deck, making the installation process super easy. RetroDeck is in active development and not yet in a final release state.

EmulationStation is a frontend that will provide you with a self-contained user interface to browse and launch your favorite retro games. The version found on the Steam Deck is known as EmulationStation-DE (Desktop Edition, shortened to ES-DE). It can be installed independently by downloading the latest AppImage and installing it on your Steam Deck, or it comes bundled within the EmuDeck or RetroDeck environments. ES-DE will auto-update itself, so if you remove or add ROMs to your folders, it will automatically catch those changes and it will reflect in the app the next time you boot ES-DE.