I love TronicsFix’s videos. Seeing him tear down various electronics and observing how he fixes most of them almost feels…therapeutic. And now that I watched his Steam Deck video, I now know what to do if either the touchscreen or the shoulder buttons go bonkers. In the video he buys a broken Steam Deck for $529. He doesn’t mention what SKU it was, but I assume it was the 256 GB model.

Great news for those of you outside the US/UK. The Steam Deck is now available for reservation/purchase in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! In a new Steam blog post, the following was mentioned: We are happy to announce today that Steam Deck is expanding to more regions. With the help of Komodo, Steam Deck will ship later this year in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. You can reserve via Valve’s authorized reseller, Komodo.

Since Vulkan has been merged into the mainline Ryujinx build a few days ago, curiosity got to the better of me and I wanted to do a comparison between this and the older OpenGL API. Vulkan, particularly on AMD – and therefore the Steam Deck – supposedly has a huge number of benefits over OpenGL, including faster shader compilation. I tested the following games: Metroid Dread (please be aware there are spoilers here!

Looks like all the changes from the SteamOS 3.3 beta have now been pulled in and put into a stable release. It seems the SteamOS update has been pushed alongside a new stable Deck client update as well, as the patch notes are combined. Among some of the many changes in this update include the removal of Firefox as part of the SteamOS image; it’s now replaced with the latest Flatpak from Flathub.

A new Deck client update has rolled out on the Beta and Preview channels. It’s small but contains a few bug fixes. You’ll particularly like this one if you dock your Deck to an external monitor and “have overscan issues.” Some bugs have also been fixed in regards to viewing guides in the overlay, or when viewing acheivements. Patch notes are as follows: Added ability to adjust image display settings for external displays that have overscan issues Fixed issues with some images being too large when viewing guides in the overlay Fixed spoiler tags in guides to be selectable so that they can be revealed Fixed issue with medium length game names in the Main Menu Overlay not properly scrolling Fixed Achievements page not updating properly when a new achievement was earned Patch notes can also be seen on Steam.

There’s another Crankshaft plugin that I wanted to highlight: Compatibility Tools Manager. With this plugin installed on the Steam Deck, you can quickly obtain the latest version of GE-Proton without having to resort to Desktop Mode. Just install it, then you will be prompted to restart the Deck. It’s that simple. You can see here after installing the latest version (7-28 at the time of writing this) and restarting the Deck, it’s now available in the compatibility list.

New Steam Deck client update has rolled out to those on the Beta and Preview branches. Particularly noteworthy changes include the addition of a temperature checker that warns the user if the Deck is outside the safe operating range, favorite/popular guides have been added as an option to the Steam overlay, and sounds are no longer played when an achievement has been earned. Besides this there have been several bug fixes, including performance issues for those who have a lot of screenshots, and issues with the Steam overlay for games that don’t have achievements.

UPDATE: the SteamOS beta update is now official. As confirmed, Firefox is now Flatpak-based. There’s also a new theme for the Plasma desktop, network connections are shared between Desktop and Game Mode, a small update for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean keyboards, the controller firmware has been updated, and the Xbox login window should now render characters that were previously hidden. Looks like a new update has shipped to SteamOS on the “Main” OS update channel, but don’t get your hopes up – almost everything that I mentioned in my SteamOS piece, those packages have not been upgraded.

So just as I was about to splurge $100 on a capture card, just for the sake of recording Steam Deck footage, I discovered a plugin for Crankshaft: Recapture. This plugin allows you to record on the Deck – in much the same way as capture software like OBS – without the need for an external capture card. I tried it briefly with MultiVersus. At native 800p resolution and high settings, the framerate didn’t dip at all while recording.

Though being able to check ProtonDB ratings at a glance on Deck is a useful feature to have with Crankshaft, you can now get more detailed reports on various games, thanks to the Steam Deck HQ plugin. As you might have guessed by the name, the compatibility details are extracted from the reviews posted on Steam Deck HQ. Check out the guide from them on how to get Crankshaft installed on the Deck.