Comment on Someone made a Steam Deck-powered pinball machine, and you can too with help from 3D printing
beerw0lf@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
3D printing, eh? I made something similar from wood. I didn’t know you could use steam deck as secondary screen for the scoreboard, I should look that up…
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Oh that’s super cool. I see you have a raspberry pi inside, do you use that just for retro games, and then swap over to a docked Steam Deck for more demanding games? How do you handle swapping?
beerw0lf@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
The raspberry is mainly for old vertical arcade games and a few retro console games. I think most of the games I’ve got there are MAME emulated. There’s this custom Linux distro RetroPie that’s tailored for emulation. It has a fancy frontend for launching the games.
Swapping between the RPi and Steam deck is done manually. Actually its a pain, because I need to lift the monitor slightly off the chassis and fiddle with the cables in side. As for the games, Steam deck is the clear winner. There are many modern games even on Steam that can run vertical setup. Mostly pinball and bullet hell type of games, but Its cool to run something like Downwell with this setup. Oh yeah, the egstarts controller board is recognised as a xbox controller on the Steam deck, so its easy enough to map the buttons for each game as needed.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Cool, thanks for sharing. I was wondering how you switched the arcade controls without swapping cables, unfortunate to hear it’s a pain. I’ve been wanting to do a virtual pinball build for awhile now, and I really like the idea of having the device be useable without my deck docked to it. I’ll probably see if I can figure out a good way to swap devices, maybe try using a usb switch and hdmi switch to swap inputs/display.