Emu Deck not working for me
Hi, so I have spent most of the night trying to get Emudeck to work, i have been over to their discord and I'm getting no help there, i have installed correctly by using the command ujust install-emudeck and letting it do its thing, I do question myself when I get to the point of when it asks what device am I using, I did try to look at video tutorials but none of them are accurate, one video tutorial showed that I could select an Asus rog ally device which is what I have but my setup does not include that option, so I'm thinking I would have to select either the steam deck or linux pc, I have been selecting linux pc so maybe that is where I went wrong?
either way, I'm stuck on the emudeck screen, I cant get off it and when I do happen to come off it the app does not install correctly and claims it doesn't exist.
I also want to use my SD Card which has my roms on there but I cant because the option is greyed out when I get to that section, again I have tried to seek help out in their discord and I got nothing overnight, I am frustrated so if anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it, please do not insult my intelligence or speak to me condescendingly, I am Autistic and I struggle to understand certain things so I do appreciate patience and guidance, thank you.
91 Replies
steamdeck or linux pc, both are correct
manually show the app where the sdcard is if their detection breaks:
/var/media/somethinghow do i do this please? im very new to linux based software and i have no idea where to start, thanks.
im just going through the install process again now to see where i can input that command
So im at this point and i cannot select the sd card and there seems to be no where to put that code in
custom directory?
will most likely give you the option to browse for the sdcard
keep in mind that emudeck has a very specific folder structure, if you have all your roms in 1 folder i dont think it will work
no i have them in different folders within my sd card, i kept the structure that i had when i used the sd card for ES-DE on my rg556
think that one is similar enough that the majority will work or all
so i tried the custom directory and when i select rhe roms folder it says "oops there was an error detecting your storage"
my install of emudeck is from way back before they offered all these custom location options so i had to manually set that up after the install so i am not very familiar with their new installer
just do internal then and symlink the roms folder afterwards like i did
symlink?
think of it as putting up a detour sign for the application
how does one do a symlink please? sorry im not familiar with this
only difference is that all the emudeck stuff will be on the internal storage (and the saves), but all your roms will be on the sdcard
i will not help migrating saves from a different system since thats a giant can of worms
no thats fine, i was seeing if i can still use the sd card with all my roms on there
will require you to go through the install and select the internal storage as the storage
then open terminal and
replace
/var/media/whatever/roms with the path to the roms folder and make damn sure there is no / after roms or whatever the folder is called
the "roms" folder is the one that contains all the folders for the different systemsok im at the stage where it wants me to copy my games, this is where i get stuck, no matter what option i choose it gets funny with me
once thats done the Emulation folder should now contain a roms folder with a chain icon on it
skip that since we will just symlink the roms directory
how do i skip it, there is no option to skip
show me the screen
as i said im not familiar with their new installer
manual copy
now it asks to open the emulation folder
Ok so i just went through the rest of the options, honestly didnt know what to select but now im here, and this is where i cannot get off this screen
yep its done and tells you to "copy" the roms to the emulation folder
do the thing in the terminal i told you to do and it will just redirect it to the sdcard
you will have to find the path to the roms folder on your sdcard yourself though
thats fine but i still cant get off that screen
yeah your display scaling is set too high
you can try drag the window on the top and move it to the side and it should reveal the close button on the top right
i cant drag it
do you have a mouse and keyboard that you can connect?
yep im using my mouse now
win+left click(hold) will let you drag any window
no matter where you click
doesnt work for me
then just alt+f4
ok did that, that worked but then when i try to open emudeck again it says it cannot be found
open it from the start menu?
also change the display settings and set scaling to 100%
yeah that works
the screen is so small at 100%
deal with it while you configure emudeck since its not scaling well
ok
if youre lucky something like 125 will work or something
but fractional scaling causes other issues
so better just use 100% then set it back to what you need it at later (keep in mind that the steam virtual keyboard only works well on 100% scaling)
i see
so next step is to symlink the sd card right?
yes
this?
yes
just remember to modify the example path i used to be the path to your roms folder and make sure that path do not end with a
/ as it can cause breakage for some emulators and the cloud sync tool they useyeah
(ask me how i ended up with 90k copies of all my saves)
oh dear haha
once youre done if you do an
ls -la inside the Emulation folder. the rom folder should look something like this
obviously saying roms instead of VM_share
is copy and paste similar key combinations? im trying to copy and paste the path in to my roms folder on my sd card
in terminal its CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste (replace V with C for copy)
its because CTRL+C is used to cancel a running command
right click still works as normal though
yeah did it through right clicking, ok so i did the command, how do i check if its worked?
if there is spaces in the path, make sure to put
" at each end of the pathi did
this
sorry what does that mean? do i type that in the bar above?
you type it in the terminal
and i have to be in the emulation folder?
yes
if youre not then
cd ~/Emulationok did that, it came up with alot of lines of folders i think
does the roms folder show up the way i showed you?
youre not in the Emulation folder
cd ~/Emulationi did that
you wrote it wrong
you wrote
#/Emulationdammit, its hard to see cos its so small
well on the terminal you can CTRL and + to zoom in
CTRL and - to zoom out
i think its done?
as long as there is no
/ at the end there it should work, assuming all the system/platform folders are inside there
so if you open pegasus or emulationstation (whichever you choose) it should now show the games for the emulators you installed through emudeck
opening now
if you want more emulators, open the emudeck app and install them through there
YES!! they are there, thank you!!!!!
if a system doesnt show up
1. youre missing the emulator in emudeck
2. the platform folder name is wrong (look at their documentaiton for what it should be named)
now i just need to remember how i set the emulators to show up in steam
and for some emulators like ps3 if your roms are in folder styles, you need the main game folder to have the extension
.ps3 and change a setting in emulationstation (no idea if you need to do this in pegasus as i dont use it)
steam rom manager, comes with emudeck, just dont add 10000 games to steam it will make you cry because the UI cant handle ithaha no the aim is to play mostly my emulation games and some steam games as i have a dual boot OS with windows 11
im just giving a warning as some people just want everything in steam for better or worse
š
yeah no i totally get it haha
also if you want to move all the data you can from emudeck onto the sdcard (as long as the sdcard is ext4 or btrfs, any other format will not work due to symlinking not being supported!) then you can do the same thing we just did with the roms folder
but we do it for the Emulation folder instead
but the filesystem on the sdcard must support symlinks and only btrfs and ext4 does so it would make the sdcard linux only for the most part
i probably wont go too deep into that, im just glad i got it to wrok as is right now, the 1tb sd card is nearly full and i have a manual fan curve on so i dont overheat the sd card
fair then having all the savedata and such on the internal storage sounds like a better idea (the way it is now)
yeah, at some point i might even move everything to the internal storage but i only have a 2tb nvme storage for now
when you do that, just delete the
roms folder link in the Emulation folder and just copy the ROMs folder into the Emulation folder, then change the name of the ROMs folder to just be lowercase
as linux is case sensitive
R is not the same as rok noted that down for future reference
thanks again for helping me, i truly appreciate your patience and teaching me how to use this
np
also since you did mention youre autistic i will give you a heads up, most of us have a strict no support in DMs policy among us, since the help threads here get indexed on the web so they show up in web searches. meaning the majority of us if DMed will refuse to help and tell you to make a thread here
oh i never DM anyone tbh so no worries from me on that front
figured its better to get that out of the way instead of being shot down in a DM by surprise
i appreciate that heads up thank you
np
i will go ahead and mark this as resolved