Buy a steam deck at this point.
But why, some say, the Switch? Why did they choose this as their goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 98 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
They choose to go to mod a Switch. They choose to go to mod a Switch in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…
To someone that can upgrade a Nintendo switch to have 8GB of RAM, can install RPCS3 and play PS3 games on it, I would say: “Do whatever you want, you are a god amongst us. I am the peasant that lives the easy life with a SteamDeck”
For a lot of people, tweaking hardware and screwing with software is as much or more of a hobby than playing games.
I’ve got about a dozen retro handhelds that are loaded with the same games but they’re all configured and modded differently simply for the love of tinkering. The time I’ve spent fooling around under the hood vs playtime is easily 50:1. But like… that’s what I buy them for.
The Steam Deck is waaaay more tinker friendly though.
Then again, I suppose plenty of people do it for the challenge.
Yeah but it’s way easier and less tinkery than what’s described in the OP
Yes, I think that’s the point. They just wanted to play PS3 games, they would probably just buy a PS3 for cheap and be done with it.
But this person obviously thought it was more interesting to mod a switch to do it and I fully agree.
This person is the same type of person that makes DOOM run inside a PDF, or something else weird.
You just gave a detailed description of my life.
I have some duplicate consoles where they are modded different ways just for the fun of it. Some of these consoles I have never actually played a game on for more then 20min.
You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…
…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
“How dare other people want to mod a different device than what I would!”
… I am just trying to ‘yes, and!’ this.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
Of course a Steam Deck would be better suited, but it’s great to see people pushing the limits of what can be done.
That’s how Linux is gonna be able to save M Macs once they don’t get MacOs updates.
Speaking of the M-cpu Macs and RPCS3, I got the old PS3 Demon’s Souls to work pretty well on an M1 + 8GB RAM Mac last year. Pretty nice to be able to play a “PS3 exclusive” Souls game on a Mac considering the total lack of Souls titles available for MacOS.
Was, Asahi is practically dead at this point due to differences between the kernel devs and Hactor/Lina over Rust in the kernel.
I’m sure the work isn’t gonna be lost and someone might step up.
I know it’s easy to say as I’m doing nothing to help them, but I’m pretty optimistic work is still gonna get done.
Yeah, here’s an update from after Hector stepped down. Hopefully it stays healthy.
I hope so, M1’s aren’t going to be supported forever by Apple :(
Just got my OLED. Really Love it. Haven’t gotten to switch emulation yet, but SNES and other old stuff works great. Bought some horror games because I only like those on controller setups from the couch, not in a computer chair. Loving it so far.
My favorite part is Decky, just customizing the hell out of it. Really fun and capable device for $500.
Playing BioShock for the first time, gone home, from the darkness, evoland, hollow knight, the messenger. All the side scrollers and games best for controllers. Puppet house is sick. Fire watch is next.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Overclocking the switch this much will definitely kill the overall lifespan of it
What if we just add more clocks?
Double time!
It won’t. The switch it massively underclocked for battery life.
The nVidia shield tablet it’s based on regularly pushes 2ghz CPU/1ghz GPU. That tablet doesn’t have the cooling solution the Switch has either, it’s just got a crappy elongated heatspreader like M1 macbooks.
