Hey Tildes, I'm super super out of the loop for gaming PCs. If I wanted to play AAA games like Stalker 2 on higher (!) settings, what kind of specs am I looking at, ballpark prices, makes that are good vs red flag don't buy? Everything seems way too expensive now I guess due to demands for AI and crypto stuff. Does it maybe make more sense to wait half a year or won't get any better?

Thoughts on GeForce rtx 4070? Need some kind of solid state hard drive, and it'll be a windows box it looks like for games. Or has Linux OS for gaming a good contender now esp when paired with steam ?

I should have done my homework well before cybermonday etc, but figure even weeks of work still isn't as good as copying you guy's homework. :) thanks in advance

Edit: Thank you everyone :D I've been leaning on the community for two big things this week (this, and learning to type software) and you guys really came through like eagles at Mt Doom.

Person I am asking for read all your comments, checked out a ton of sites you guys suggested, and
ended up finding a BlackFriday/Cyber Monday deal for a laptop with (reads sheet)

GeForce RTX 4080 Ryzen 9 7945HX 32GB 1TB SSD 240Hz 16" laptop

price was $2500 CAD ($ 1785 USD) + taxes. (non affiliated product link here)

many thanks again~

My general question ... where do you folks go when searching for replacement parts for aging technology, particularly pertaining to game consoles? I've come across iFixit, and of course there's Amazon and eBay as well, but I've been having some difficulty finding a particular part.

My specific issue is, I have an old Dualshock 4 (model CUH-ZDT2U, with PCB/motherboard model JDM-055) that is on the outs. It started experiencing some stick drift, so I took it apart to clean the contacts in the joystick housing to the best of my ability. In doing so, one of my kids managed to get a hold of the controllers' guts and break off the vibration motor wires from the board.

So, after taking the board and chassis to a local Makerspace, I got the wires soldered back onto the board. So far so good! However, the stick drift is still an issue and the vibration connection isn't that great. So now, I'm hoping to find some replacement parts - namely, a replacement board with the chassis and motors included.

One of the main reasons why I'm trying to refit this old controller, rather than replace it outright ... is because my wife bought the controller (and the PS4 it came with) as an anniversary present years ago. I'm the sentimental type and I'm trying to keep as much of this old controller going as I can, Ship-of-Theseus style. In addition, these controllers don't come cheap - $70 seems to be the basement these days for a new, in-box controller.

I've taken a swing at purchasing replacement parts off eBay - however, while the controller models matched, the board models did not. iFixit has the exact parts I need, but they are out of stock and their stock is inconsistent. I found another site - Fasttech.ca - that purports to have the same parts, but looking around online I've found a fair bit of discussion surrounding this site and the fact that it may be less-than-reputable.

Any advice on where else I might be able to look for parts?

Anniversary

The Dreamcast is now 25 years old in the US, after its memorable release date of 9/9/99!

Europe has another month to go (it released on 14 October 1999), and Japan already beat the world to the anniversary by almost a year (27 November 1998).

Share your thoughts, memories, favorite games, or anything else related to the Dreamcast here. You can reminisce about how cool Sonic Adventure was, how groundbreaking Shenmue was, or how unsettling Seaman was.

Play Along

I am taking a month out of my regular gaming habits (mostly smaller indie Steam stuff) to play different Dreamcast games through September in honor of the anniversary. If anyone wants to join me in that, I’d love the company!

Every so often I’ll post a comment to this topic with thoughts on what I’m playing. Feel free to post yours as well!

If anyone needs a place to get started, we have a topic with some game recommendations.

I’ll be emulating them on my Steam Deck through RetroDECK (which uses the Flycast core for RetroArch). I’ve already tested out a bunch of games, and performance and compatibility seem to be really good.

There are no points for this (it’s purely for fun), but if there were, anyone playing on original hardware would get bonus ones!

I'm a new Deck owner, recieved unit in May and played sparingly for the past 2ish months.

Overall really liking it, gushed about it everywhere to everyone, and big fan of Valve. But two days ago, one of the Deck shoulder buttons stopped working suddenly. Reached out to steam and they're having me send it in, which is what I would expect. But the way they phrased it kind of souring my initial high of owning the Deck:

Based on the information you have provided, we believe it is unlikely that the current issue reflects a problem with this device as it was delivered to you. It may instead be related to your particular use of the product. Regardless, we would like to offer complimentary service as a gesture of goodwill.

So it's one of those kinds of warranty that excludes regular use? Is this one rep just awkwardly placing blame on me or is that their overall vibe? In contast, I have PS1, PS2, xBox original/360 controllers that still have all the shoulder buttons functioning normally, along with super old PSPs, DS, DS Lites, 3DS, Switch'es and none of them have failed aside from the infamous Switch drifts. Nintendo, for their part, fixed the drifts without implying it was my fault.

Anyone else dealt with Valve customer service and warranty?

According to SteamDB, at the time of this posting:

• There are 5,006 Verified games.
• There are 10,240 Playable games.

I thought this was a noteworthy milestone worth sharing -- The Little Linux Handheld That Could now has a definitive library of >15,000 games!

(The actual library size is significantly larger when you consider how many games run on it that don't yet have a rating, and even that's saying nothing of non-Steam games and things like ROMs as well).

I guess this is just a thing I like to do lol. I got an OLED Steam Deck and have been playing around with it for about a week, so I wanted to share what all I got.

TL;DR: OLED is the definitive version of this product. If you're at all interested, whether or not budget is a concern this model is worth looking at, especially if you can actually get your hands on one to try for a bit. Words aren't quite what they need to be to get across how it looks and feels.

The long of it:

Valve wasn't kidding about stuff like a little performance improvement and better battery life. It feels like someone took the LCD deck and made a checklist of every single thing that could be improved, and then did it. The result is just about the best refresh of a product I've ever seen.

The screen is the most obvious upgrade and it really is great to look at. It is a big jump to go from an LCD at 60hz, to OLED at 90hz with HDR available. As great as VibrantDeck is, no amount of color fuckery can really reproduce what is happening when you have these features. For games that support HDR, it can feel like you've actually made an upgrade, because of how differently it can handle things like bright flashes of light and particle effects on top of the color differences. The refresh rate is tied to the frame limiter by default, so when you drop the frame limit the refresh rate tends to stay double whatever that is. 40fps/80hz feels better than 40/40 to me, like stuttering just isn't as bothersome.

Be aware it's on developers to implement HDR, which means sometimes you run into a game with a shitty implementation. FFVII R comes to mind. Just know that if you run across a game where this feature seems to make the game look terrible, it's not the device doing it.

The improvements to the battery do mean something like a ~40% increase. Games like Armored Core VI and Elden Ring tended to last about 1.5-2 hours on the LCD model, on OLED it's more like 2.5-3, and this is the sweet spot imo. Rare that I'm gonna sit down and play for that long in the first place, so having this much power available means being able to play here and there with much less concern. Games that already played well in a low power state just get that much more time. One thing to know if you're coming from an LCD - it doesn't save your power profiles. Input profiles yes (if you saved them), but power settings need to be redone game-to-game.

The device itself is a little lighter, and it feels like it sits in my hands a little better. The difference is minute, but noticeable, and nice. All of the buttons feel good, the sticks have slightly more resistance to them, and the trackpads are much nicer to use. In particular, the way you click the trackpads is more forgiving by default, so while it is a little easier to mis-click it feels more like using a "real" trackpad. The deck in general is the only device I find doesn't really aggravate my carpal tunnel, and the OLED model keeps that up.

On the software side there isn't really a difference - SteamOS is more or less exactly the same with a few OLED-specific settings. Most of your info gets saved and loaded up when you log in. Cloud saves are one piece of course, but too, any controller profiles you saved will come back, and the SD card can just be freely transferred/there isn't really any setup to it. From boot to play I mostly just waited on the game to download - setting up the device was as simple as waiting for it to do an update, then log in, and that's it. It doesn't pester you to register for anything/no ads.

Things like sleep/wake and transitioning to desktop mode are faster and more consistent. Pretty regularly, my LCD model would fail to sleep/wake correctly - I'd put it to sleep and upon waking it, it would reboot. Inconsistent but often enough to get annoyed with. With the OLED model, i notice this doesn't happen as often. It still does, but much less frequently. The improvements to the trackpads means I use desktop mode more often, it feels much nicer to navigate. All of the stuff I had before was simple to install and restore - emudeck, decky, cryoutilities all installed without any issues and worked fine after I moved over all my stuff from the first deck. Haven't hit any issues with decky plugins either.

Even the carrying case got a pass. It's been redesigned a little, with an extra velcro fastener bit and tighter mold inside, black instead of white.

Transferring my information was about as easy as you could do. There are several options - I mostly used KDE connect, but there's also Warpinator, and a deck plugin called DeckMTP that can let you do a direct USB connection. Literally just copy/paste, once I installed all the stuff I had before I could just drop in the old device's things and be good to go. One thing to be aware of, is that for games which don't support Steam Cloud, you need to copy their save data over. That's gonna mostly be in a folder in /steamapps called CompatData. Takes a little doing but it's not hard to figure out. The hardest thing to set up was STALKER Anomaly, and all that was was about a five step process of clicking things in Wine. By the way, if you make a custom controller profile for a non-steam game, when you add that game to the library make sure it has the same name as before and your controller profile will be saved!

Overall I'm impressed to the point I intend to hold off buying any more PC hardware until a Deck 2 appears. If that product gets the same kind of attention this one did there's no doubt in my mind it will be fantastic. Considering too, the ability to dock and use peripherals, I think I'd feel safe recommending an OLED steam deck as a replacement for a gaming machine + non-work computer to just about anybody. $399 as a base price for PC Gaming is fucking awesome, and $549 for this improved model, at least I feel is very much worth it. $150 for an OLED screen, more storage, bigger battery is not bad. The deck is a hugely popular product, which means you get the added benefit of folks constantly tinkering and messing with stuff to make it work, on top of the odd developer specifically targeting it (such as in Cyberpunk, or how Bannerlord reworked its control scheme). Those kinds of communities exist around other devices, but not nearly to the same extent, and they'll die fast as those products come and go.

So that's what I got. I hope this was informative and helpful. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer as best I can. I'm super happy with the deck as a product, it feels a lot like getting to see what it looks like when someone goes the distance and throws their full weight behind this kind of product.

Edit: I don't know how well this will come through looking on different screens, but here are a few screenshots from AC VI and Morrowind that made use of HDR. Even if it doesn't come through - if you've never owned a deck and were considering one, yeah stuff can look this good on it! It's amazing.

As title says, once Valve announced the OLED deck, I saw the refurbished originals go on a deep discount and figured it was time to buy in. So I ordered a refurb 512GB and I’m so excited for it to arrive! Been in a gaming rut for a long time now and, having never been a PC gamer, I’m look forward to checking out a bunch of games I’ve never played before.

What tips do you have for a first time Deck owner?

Any essential games I should be sure to get?

And finally, is it possible to get games I own on the Epic Games Store (I collected all their free games over the years) or Xbox Game Pass PC games on my Steam Deck?

I live in a pretty compact house, and have my work office upstairs in a corner of one of my kids bedrooms.

Obviously, gaming in there after they are asleep is a no go! Our one tv is usually given over to my wife on evenings I break out the Steam Deck - which has been my first foray back into gaming since having kids and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

However, I'm interested if anyone has found a neat solution to use it in e.g. desktop mode without a conventional monitor or TV to dock with, that I could break out quickly on a breakfast bar and then stow easily.

I'm envisaging some kinda of Frankensteined cheap laptop shell housing to contain the screen and keyboard-

Steam Deck -> USB C Dock -> HDMI out to laptop screen and USB out to keyboard.

Anyone familiar with something resembling this kind of setup, or something similar?

For the first time in my adult life I actually have some real discretionary money, and the one personal purchase I've wanted to make for a long time is a VR rig. I was hoping for input I can be pretty sure isn't tainted by capitalism/ads.

Cost-vs-value will matter a lot, but the actual cost isn't too big a concern anymore. Budget up to maybe $3-4K if it's really worth the money.

And to note, I already have a pretty gnarly personal computer that is more than capable of running VR games (Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core / RTX 3090 / 32GB DDR4) -- I just need the rig.