Someone Turned Their Steam Deck Into A Clamshell Handheld

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I love the design of the Steam Deck. It just feels great to hold in my hands; all the buttons are easy to reach, the screen is a great size, and I love using it. However, there are times when I do miss the DS days, when my clamshell handheld was my main source of portable gaming. There are clamshell handheld PCs, but none that are as mainstream. However, that hasn’t stopped the community, and I saw that someone had turned their Steam Deck into a clamshell handheld, and it looks incredible.

Made and posted on Reddit by MadMario0_0 (aka Pixel Nerd), the perfectly named Flip Deck was debuted. In their initial post, they described how they took apart their Steam Deck and turned it into a full-on clamshell device. They were able to get all the parts from the Deck into this design, except for the joysticks, but they found a way to make it work. It even comes fully equipped with the two back buttons and trackpads.

They mention it’s a little bit taller than the Deck, by about 4mm, but they were able to cut off 100mm of length with this new design. There is a lot of empty space in the middle of the controller, and I would miss the fantastic handles the shell of the normal Deck model has, but I love this. It’s so cool seeing the community does such incredible things with the Deck. They even posted a follow-up with a video showing the Flip Deck in action, and the spacing for the buttons doesn’t look like as much of a problem as I was worried about.

This is just another wonderful project that the community has shown us, and I can’t wait to see more of what MadMario0_0 might do with this. Hopefully, he will post a tutorial or models of the shell so we can try making it ourselves.

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