Pair a Steam Deck With a Samsung Tablet to Get the Ultimate Jumbo Nintendo 3DS

Believe it or not, at one cut-off date, the Nintendo 3DS was thought-about a big handheld with its XL mannequin, but it surely’s simply not while you evaluate it to newer transportable consoles just like the Switch. The 3DS XL is now comparatively small, which was apparently an issue for one fan, who got here up with a option to supersize it—dual screens and all—utilizing one other, beefier handheld: the Steam Deck.

This isn’t the primary time Reddit consumer ‘rising_tony’ has tried to recreate the Nintendo 3Ds—minus the namesake 3D impact—on a bigger scale utilizing the Steam Deck and its touchscreen. A number of weeks in the past, they shared a video of a different setup on Reddit that used the Citra 3DS emulator operating on a gaming PC, with a desktop monitor replicating the hand held’s prime display screen and a Steam Deck replicating the touchscreen and bodily gaming controls. Performance was nice, but it surely lacked the 3DS’ second finest function: portability.

Yesterday, ‘rising_tony’ shared a video of a brand new setup that was as a substitute utterly transportable and utterly superior, even when it added much more weight to the already heavy 1.5-pound Steam Deck. The desktop monitor was changed by an 8-inch Samsung pill connected on to the Steam Deck utilizing a customized 3D-printed attachment you can see in more detail here.

All of the 3DS emulation is now dealt with by Citra operating on the Steam Deck, which has greater than sufficient processing energy to take action, however to make the twin display screen setup work required some intelligent workarounds. A “dummy HDMI plug” was created utilizing a linked USB-C dongle to “force the steam deck to create a second display that extends the desktop vertically.” The connected Samsung Tablet is operating the Steam Link Android app and the Steam Deck really streams the second dummy show to it.

Streaming video all the time introduces latency, however on this case, the Samsung pill was linked to the Steam Deck utilizing the identical USB-C dongle, and tethering was enabled. This meant each the console and the pill had been utilizing the identical bodily community, offering streaming speeds of as much as 100 mb/s. That decreased the latency and lag sufficient to the purpose the place it was nearly imperceptible, and in response to ‘rising_tony,’ “even the shooting gallery minigames in Ocarina of Time are unaffected, and with motion controls they are a breeze.”

Although no {hardware} or software program was modified to make this work, we’re nonetheless completely satisfied to declare it an extremely intelligent hack, and but one more reason to think about investing in a Steam Deck.