It’s been well worth the three-month wait for today’s SteamTinkerLaunch update. We’ve got so many new features, improvements, and bug fixes with the “Still Alive” update that is v12.0. Those of you who use this Swiss army knife utility on Steam Deck, and those of you who use mods with Sonic Frontiers, should be particularly excited about this update, as there’s some goodies tossed in your way. To start, frostworx, the original author of STL, has stepped down as maintainer.

We’ve got a sweet new release for the excellent ProtonUp-Qt app, for managing all of your compatibility tools for Steam, Lutris, and more. When viewing your game list, you can now check the ProtonDB ranking with the simple click of a button. Super convenient! NorthstarProton and Steam-Play-None have been added as compatibility tools. The former is “a Proton build based on TKG’s Proton-tkg build system to run the Northstar client on Linux and SteamDeck, along with some enhancements out-of-the-box.

If you follow me on Mastodon, you’re probably aware that I’m a bit of a Super Smash Bros. Melee fan. Someone in my Discord went so far as to call me a “Melee head.” It makes sense; there’s rarely a day that goes by without me playing a few singles or doubles matches. Melee is one of those games where it’s not only played for fun; my mind feels sharper, more focused.

PhobGCC. Chances are you’ve probably never heard of it. Allow GitHub to explain what it is: The PhobGCC is a replacement motherboard for Gamecube controllers that reads stick position using magnets and Hall effect sensors instead of potentiometers that can wear out. It offers an advanced digital snapback filter that doesn’t reduce responsiveness and actually improves responsiveness in Melee. It also features gate calibration, swappable buttons, and facilitates installation of discrete switches on the D-pad and face buttons.

Steam’s winter sale just kicked off, and with it are several decent titles on sale. Here’s some recommended games, all of which are Steam Deck Verified: Action Adventure/RPG Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered – 25% off Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales – 25% off Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade – 43% off Horizon Zero Dawn – 67% off Tunic – 10% off Cuphead – 30% off Sackboy: A Big Adventure – 33% off Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time – 50% off Fighting

Looks like Reddit user Spacefish008 got Portal with RTX running on a 5700 XT. They note that they get “~45 FPS on 846x643” on High settings. All that’s needed is the RADV_PERFTEST=rt,emulate_rt %command% launch parameter. The OP explains how this works: It uses DirectX and DXVK exposes the DXR APIs to the game if it detects raytracing support in the underlying Vulkan driver. The Vulkan driver is RADV, which can emulate raytracing via shaders on older-gen AMD GPUs like NAVI10 / RDNA1.

Somehow I missed this. This has been around for a week now (thanks to GOL for noticing). At any rate, Proton 7.0-6 is now available as a release candidate. Playable titles include: Gotham Knights UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection Wargame: Red Dragon Heroes of the Dark Super Arcade Racing Crazy Machines 3 NinNinDays2 雀姬 (Mahjong ladies) 20 bugs have been fixed, ranging from the OSK on Deck for A Plague Tale: Requiem, Xbox Live login fail for As Dusk Falls, multiple monitor support for Project CARS 2, and the blank window when starting the EA app launcher.

SteamOS 3.4 has now reached the stable branch. I’m not going to re-hash what I’ve already said about it, but as a quick refresh, here’s a few of the new features: update to the Arch base; Plasma, Mesa, GLIBC, and more software have been updated KDE Connect is now included tons of bug fixes, ranging from graphics driver crashes to input to audio new firmware for docking station you can now force vsync off by enabling screen tearing level 2 MangoHUD now goes across the screen rather than going down; perfect for games that use 16:9 TRIM has been re-enabled eject option added for removable drives automatic mounting of ext4 external drives support for 8BitDo Ultimate wireless controller dongle Two hotfixes were added later on to “address a regression in how SD cards were handled” and to “fix an issue with HDMI/DisplayPort audio going to sleep after being idle on external displays.

Wine 8.0 has reached the release candidate stages. RC1 upgraded VKD3D to 1.6, provided an improved joystick control panel, and fixed 52 bugs. Now RC2 has arrived, and with it are 50 bug fixes. Note that from here on out Wine 8.0 is in a feature freeze; only bugs will get fixed from here on out. There’s quite a few gaming-related fixes in RC2: there should no longer be a crash when bringing up the Steam overlay with a PE build of VKD3D with D3D12 support gamepad buttons should now work properly and no longer be delayed Unreal Tournament 99 mouse clicks in main menu should now continue to work after first click Warframe should no longer crash when loading before menu with WineD3D Kholat (GOG version) should now run Silent Hill 2 should no longer get the -installshield extraction error while installing performance degradation fixes for World of Warcraft and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men demo construction set extender mod for ESO should no longer crash Resident Evil 7 should now properly render in DX11 mode Chicken Tournament should no longer crash on start Serious Sam 2 should no longer crash with OpenGL renderer Some other fixes have made it in as well; see the full patch notes on WineHQ.

The first day of winter also marks a new update to Proton Experimental. Small one, but a good one. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt now apparently works – I’m assuming this is in reference to the recent DX12 upgrade that had been broken for so many people. Support for steering wheels has been improved, but in what way, the patch notes don’t mention. You might be able to take a look at the commit history to get a hint.