The Steam Deck has become a pretty high-end device for retro gamers anxious to play their collections of eight million ROMS on the go. With EmuDeck making it so easy to install and maintain the majority of popular emulators, it has only been more recently that players have been looking more into how they can eke out even better performance from the Deck.
Readwrite Gaming reported on a major change in the development of the Dolphin emulator some time back. This covered how updates were going to come far more regularly and push on to become the best way of playing GameCube and Nintendo Wii games.
Until now, if you wanted Dolphin on your Steam Deck it was possible, but only by virtue of a community-led project to compile the emulator in Linux to enable seamless integration with Valve’s handheld.
Now, Dolphin devs have reached out to the creators of the unofficial package and will seemingly now integrate it officially under the project’s umbrella.
Dolphin developer OatmealDone initially asked on the unofficial package’s Github, “For the past 8 years, the Dolphin project has chosen not to create any official builds for Linux, instead opting to relegate that task to the distributions. However, with the rise of the Steam Deck, we’ve observed significant user demand for an official Flatpak version of Dolphin. As this unofficial Flatpak is being used by many people already, we think that collaborating with you and making this Flatpak official would be the best way to approach this. Is this something that everyone is interested in doing?”
Things have now moved on and the unofficial Flatpak will soon be moved under the Dolphin team’s control. This will make updates quicker and more stable and also removes the chance of accidentally removing malware from an unofficial site.
