To those saying it’s likely hardware damage: nope, luckily not. Booting into a different USB image doesn’t produce this. But booting into tone same ISO produces these errors every time (it starts out normal and progressively gets worse over time).

OK, thanks for the hint. I just found out that you will only be prompted to update if you:

1. power everything off (shut down deck completely, don’t just sleep it)
2. remove all peripherals connected to the dock (except network cable if you use that for your connection)
3. start the deck
4. if there are any updates for the the dock, they should show in the options of gaming mode

here’s to hoping the updates will allay the display issues

I vaguely remembered it offering me updates when I first set the dock up (purchased the dock much later then the deck). I’ll make sure I have the latest version.

Good to know. It was a common problem with XCOM 2 for me.

Whenever possible I tried to get around this distorted audio noise after resuming from sleep by first opening a pause menu and then sending the deck to sleep. It seems to occur less the less audio channels are used by the game engine at the moment that you sent the deck to sleep.

Ideally you’ll adjust both in game settings and deck settings for each game with in-game settings taking precedence as they give you access to fine tuning custom tailored to that game. The deck settings are great to tinker with when you want longer battery life especially. If it’s inside the dock and charging while you play you needn’t worry much about optimization (frame rate limit, heat limit, half rate shading, etc.) and can leave it at the sensible defaults.

The Steam Deck per-game control layout is very helpful for games that don’t come with native controller support or those that don’t let you rebind controls inside the game itself.

I don’t own the games you mention, so I can’t suggest specifics but my general way of setting up a game is:

1. install the game and get it running at all
2. use in-game options to find a resolution and layout comfortable from your preferred playing posture/position
3. enable frame rate overlay in the steam settings
4. start with default or auto detect settings for graphics or look up what others recommend online in sites like protondb. if you hit a comfortable frame rate (40-60+ for me personally) keep increasing the graphics quality settings in game as long it remains fluid to play. Don’t need to do it all in one session. I usually minimally increment the graphics settings at the start of each gaming session and simply revert once it’s no longer fluid.

I often use this over KDE’s inbuilt screenshot tool because this one has a quick way to crop a screenshot

That likely means they’ll put thought into a pleasant controller layout (including steam actions) as well. Good stuff.

git gud

not a meme per se but I always found the command abcde confusing:

user1: How to best rip this music album??

user2: Oh simple: abcde

user1: 🤔🤔?

abcde stands for ‘a better CD encoder’, the more you know

I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand …

In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

That sounds like a useful feature. Which apps are you using?

How do you tag another user? Did you just mean you left a mental note or is it possible to assign custom tags to users somehow?

GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.

My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

1. It’s stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today’s standards.
2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don’t ‘bleed’ into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.

Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).

In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?

Is that what the Steam Deck uses? It’s pretty useful.

Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.

It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.

Oh nice, I had a lot of fun with the demo back then. I’d describe it as basically XCOM 2 but with super heroes and you can pull off a lot of fun combos when your heroes work together.

You can export all your bookmarks to a single JSON file. it’s a format designed for storing and exchanging data between machines just like this.

Also good for making local backups of your favorites.