Dolphin Emulator Fixed Steam Deck Gyro Auto-Disabling Last Month

Playing Gamecube and Wii games on the Steam Deck has never been easier, thanks to how incredible the Dolphin emulator is, but the team hasn't slowed down. Last month, a SteamOS update had the tendency to break gyro controls, but the team went on the offensive and fixed the issue with a neat workaround.

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In the newest progress report released today by the team, they detailed how they encountered an issue that would disable gyro controls in Dolphin a month ago, which affected Wii games a lot. This happened whenever SteamOS thought gyro was no longer being used, like when opening the Quick Access menu or other Steam UI elements, and it would disable without re-enabling when back in-game. They weren't sure what the reasoning was, but thanks to a quick workaround from ArcaneNibble, this issue was circumvented.

Instead of trying to figure out why SteamOS does this and figure out a way to fix it or trying to check whether Gyro was enabled or not, Dolphin would just consistently re-enable Gyro around every second. This means that the program will just keep trying to enable gyro at 1-second intervals. If the gyro is already enabled, nothing will change, but if disabled, it will come back on. There could be a slight delay if you try to use gyro right after returning from a menu, but it should be negligible with it happening so quickly.

While this did happen a month ago and has been fixed since it is still great to see the team working diligently on keeping the emulator stable and updated on the Steam Deck. It is probably my most used emulator, and I will never stop playing Super Mario Sunshine or Super Smash Bros. Melee!

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