No, the image you see here isn’t Photoshopped. This a real Steam Deck, playing a real Sega Genesis cartridge of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, with a real Super Nintendo controller. And yes it does work.
This was all possible thanks to the power of Retrode2, and RetroArch.
How does this work?
For those who are not aware, the Retrode2 is a Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis Cartridge Reader, which is designed to read the game data from the respective game cartridges. However unlike other cartridge readers like the GBxCART or the Open Source Cartridge Reader the Retrode 2 treats the game files as files on a standard USB drive. This means when you plug everything in, the game can literally be read from the Cartridge on the PC you’ve plugged it into. Or anything else that can detect USB.
For a PC like a Steam Deck, on paper you can just simply plug in the Retrode2 and the games should just appear. But sadly not everything is as easy as that. Just plug in the Retrode2 and you will see nothing. So how do I get it to work?
Setup Process
Step 1: was to fight Linux. Steam doesn’t want to auto mount random drives on your system without vetting that the drive can have Steam Games installed on them. As amusing as it would be to put 1/100th of a Steam Game on a Sonic 2 cart, it makes sense that it wouldn’t mount. So how do you mount it? With Desktop mode! When you return to Game mode the Retrode2 and files will be visible
Step 2: fighting with the controller. By default RetroArch will try to mount all the inputs on the Retrode 2, before the decks input. Cool if you want to play with SNES and Genesis controllers. But how it mounts it, is a bit annoying. So you will need to go into input configuration and set the controller to the appropriate mount points. This is a lot buggier than I thought it would be.
Step 3: Is the play the game. With everything ready you can find your game, then load it. On first load it’ll take a second or two (depending on cartridge size), but once loaded it’ll load again quickly now it’s in RAM, and boy is this cool… and completely impracticable.
Honestly by the time you have to mount the device you are better off, just copying the game to the internal drive and not have to deal with the Retrode2 at all. However as a prop for videos, or to show off that, yes, video games are just proprietary storage for games, it does an excellent job.
Related Short Videos
I also wanted to see if I could have some fun and the limits of the hardware. While Sonic 3 & Knuckles didn’t work, I was shocked to see that Mario Paint and the SNES mouse worked! If you want to see the results, please check out the 2 shorts below.
Mario Paint Short
Sonic 3 Short