This one’s a shorter one. I just wanted to draw some attention to some tech that’s really nice.

I rather enjoy Splatoon.

Since getting back into it two years back, I’ve played through the Splatoon 3 campaign, Splatoon 2 campaign, about 7 or 8 Side Order runs, and Octo Expansion (easily the best of the bunch.)

But I never played the Splatoon 1 campaign. And with my Wii U gone (shoutouts to the relative who borrowed it for Wii Sports during lockdown, then lost it) I wouldn’t be able to play it… Or could I?

At this point I recalled two things:

• About once or twice a year, I make copies of every piece of physical game media I own, and I did this for all my Wii U games before losing the console, and
• A mutual online had mentioned a tool called EmuDeck capable of installing emulators quickly for use on a Steam Deck.

Well, I own a Steam Deck. I went to the website and took a look. How hard could it be?

Really, really easy

I downloaded and ran the installer from SteamOS desktop mode. It installed everything for me, and showed me exactly where to place my ROMs and Wii U NAND. I copied everything over from a Cemu install I had made a few years back using my Wii Us dumped files, and…

Boom! It was that simple. The game just booted right up. It’s even possible to view the Gamepad screen by pressing the extra buttons on the back of the Deck. Touchscreen support works. It all just works. It really was that easy!

It really boggles my mind thinking about how much labor went into this magic. From the people who initially researched the Wii U, to reverse engineering the OS and eventually taking over IOSU kernel. Then, the ability to dump games, and with it easy dumpers anyone could run. Now add in the enormous amounts of reverse engineering necessary to create a working emulator, and then the recent Cemu port to Vulkan and Linux. And finally, at the top layer, a group of people who obviously cared a whole lot about making the experience really polished on the Steam Deck.

Also Metroid Prime Works

I also remembered at this point that I had purchased the Metroid Prime Trilogy a few years back before the Wii U eShop closed, but had only gotten around to playing the first one.

Well, EmuDeck specifically supports PrimeHack, so I’m able to just fire up Metroid Prime 2 and play, complete with a control scheme actually suited for the 21st century.

Finally, EmuDeck registers every game you have set up in the Steam UI, so you can just see them and launch them like any other game.

Epilogue

Cemu broke for some reason at one point while playing. No clue what happened, and a reboot fixed it, but it led to some fascinating graphical corruption art that you can only get through broken emulators. Here are some pics:

Pics in here!