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Emulating games on the Steam Deck is always a treat. Not only can we play most games from Steam, but we can play tons of games from older systems with ease. However, not all of the emulators used to play these games are intuitive on handhelds. However, for those wanting to play PS3 games, it sounds like that issue will be changing soon.

RPCS3

Over on Twitter/X, PS3 emulator RPCS3 posted about improvements they want to make to the emulator when using it on a handheld PC. Currently, they are looking for suggestions from the community and will be focused more on the UI and better gamepad support. They noted that this has nothing to do with game compatibility and mostly prioritize features to make it easier to use on the handheld.

In a follow-up comment, the team noted that they are already working on a redesigned in-game home menu, more settings that can be changed without having to restart the game, better home button mapping, and the ability to add PS3 games to Steam directly from within RPCS3. All of these would be great extra features to have, and it makes me very excited to see the team recognizing that.

There have also been some meat suggestions from the community under the post. One user suggested emulators automatically configure games based on settings recommendations from the wiki; well, another suggested gamepad-controllable game selection. Some have even suggested gamepad shortcuts and a big picture mode similar to PCSX2, which would be great as well.

There’s no timeframe on when these improvements will be shipped out, but it’s great to see the team is working on them. Even though the emulator runs on the Deck, it doesn’t have many issues playing games; using it could be simplified. It sounds like the team is very aware of that and is working hard to remedy it.

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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