Emulating my childhood with a Steam Deck

When I was a kid growing up I played lots of video games. My most memorable moments were with my PS2 in my bedroom playing Need for Speed: Underground and Midnight Club 3 (racing games were and still are my favorite genre of video games). Eventually the PS2 broke and I was off to high school and largely stopped playing video games to focus on my studies.

In recent years though I’ve developed quite but of nostalgia and wanted to pick up and play those games again. I started by getting myself a PS2 off eBay but I was quickly disappointed because while a PS2 looks great on a small CRT television, it looked like crap on modern flat screen TV’s, that coupled with 15 year old PS2 struggling to read games off equally old discs made it a very poor experience. After that poor experience I forgot about it for a few years until about 2 years ago when I picked up an Xbox Series S.

The Series S is a really great piece of hardware in general and I also learned that it could emulate games if you put it into “developer mode”. I paid Microsoft the $5 to get a developer account and installed a modified version of PCSX2 and added a few games and just about cried when I saw how great the game looked with the up-scaling that the emulation did. This is how I remembered my childhood and I was stoked.

But while the games looked beautiful, there were a number of other issues. For one there was noticeable input lag with every game I played and it really put a hamper on the experience but also the process was just a pain in the a**. Because the emulator only ran in “dev mode”, I would have to reboot my Xbox every time to play and that coupled with the tedious setup just made it too much of a hassle to play. Just like before I promptly go busy with life and forgot about it until this past summer.

I was scrolling Instagram one morning when I saw an ad for a “retro handheld” that could play tons of older games and that piqued my interest again. After some searching around, I picked up myself an Anaberic RG40XX-V (memorable name I know) for around $70 on Amazon.

The device was amazing and I was so exited to get it and boot it up. For a while I thought I had finally found “the device” to relive my childhood and I would take it out and play some PS1 or Game boy Advance games before bed every day. I also realized that a “mobile” device was the way to go because now as an adult, the spare time I had was seldom by the TV.

But while it was a great device, it couldn’t play PS2 games so my search continued. At this point I was done trying to find the cheapest device that “could” play PS2 games and wanted something that could play them without breaking a sweat. I looked around at my options but eventually settled on a Steam Deck after rave reviews from a friend.

Since getting my Steam Deck is can confidently say that I have found “the device” for emulating all the games from my childhood. The hardware is super solid and just chews through PS2 games without breaking a sweat. I was concerned about battery life while emulating but since the Steam Deck is designed to run AAA games for a few hours, it can easily handle 4+ hours PS2 emulation. And the game performance is just spectacular, while my Xbox ran into numerous input lag issues, the Steam Deck plays the PS2 games just like I remember and often times even better than the original hardware, with long loading screens taking a fraction of the time to load.

All of this did not come cheap though, while the Anaberic can be had for under $100, the particular Steam Deck I bought set me back almost $450. Nevertheless I still think it was worth the investment considering that I will almost certainly never have any emulation woes again.