Steam Deck: Emulating Retro Games

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Aywren

One of the first things I explored on my Steam Deck when I realized what it was capable of was emulation of retro games. That being said, I’m actually not that big on emulation in general. I’d much rather purchase and own a physical copy of my games. My physical Switch library is proof of that.

Despite living in an age of rampant re-releases, there are some retro games that have never seen the light of day in recent times (Lufia, I’m looking at you). The only option we have for such games is emulation, thus I dabble in it a bit here and there.

Steam Deck is wonderful for emulation! I was so surprised at how good old SNES games look on this form factor! So far, I’ve only installed SNES games, which don’t require anything other than the emulator and ROM out of the box, but these games have performed very well!

How To Emulate

There are a couple of routes you can take if you want to emulate on Steam Deck.

-EmuDeck

-RetroDECK

Both require a download outside of Steam or the discovery panel. The websites I’ve linked above provide further links for these downloads and for the documentation on what to do.

I chose to use EmuDeck for no particular reason over RetroDECK. It was just the one I found the how-to video for, I think. Following this video, I was able to get everything set up and running fairly quickly:

Once you’ve installed the software and the emulators, you then have to download the ROMs – I’m not going to link here or go into where to find them as a quick search for “emulation ROMs” will take you where you need to go. I think you can also play ROMs off of an SD card on the Steam Deck, but I chose to download mine to folders in my Steam Deck’s documents.

Then you just have to follow the instructions (see video above if you’re using EmuDeck) to import them to Steam. With EmuDeck, the emulators and games are placed in a “Non-Steam” section within your library on the Steam Deck.

Then, you can view and launch the game from your Steam library like you would any other game.

Now, when it comes to controls and hotkeys, each emulator is a little different. This was something I had to research, with much thanks to the EmuDeck wiki for the help. For example, I use RetroArch for my SNES games, but RetroArch has hotkeys specific to itself for things such as closing the emulator, taking a screenshot, saving a state, loading a state, that sort of thing.

So that’s something you’ll need to look into based on the emulator you use. Keep in mind that emulators change depending on the system you want to emulate! Also, some games may require bios installs to play – this is more advanced than I know how to do just yet because, again, my experience has been specifically emulating old SNES games, which didn’t need anything additional.

I will note that Steam Deck doesn’t do a good job of emulating games that require two screens – such as the Nintendo DS or 3DS. But I think that’s a common issue for a lot of emulators.

Anyhow, I’m keeping this a short post on a rather expansive topic because there are other places that provide the how-to much better than I can. This is mostly to say that I’ve tried it and I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far! I might have to rope in some old Dreamcast games or games from other systems soon -- just for the fun of it!

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