Games: Steam Deck and SNES Controlled With GNU/Linux
-
Boiling Steam ☛ A Suprising Discovery Inside The Steam Deck's APU
Following an excellent Youtube video from HighYield recently, we have learnt two things about the design of the APU used in the Steam Deck LCD version: - The Steam Deck APU (codenamed Van Gogh) has unused parts with a lot more cores. And it is very likely that the exact same APU was also used for the Magic Leap 2 AR glasses, which makes use of such cores. - The Steam Deck APU used in the OLED version may be the first chipset entirely made for the Steam Deck platform, with a smaller footprint not just thanks to the 6nm lithography, but because the unused cores were removed. Now that you know what we are going to look at, let’s see the whole story in pictures.
-
Raspberry Pi ☛ SNES controller for giants
Every button on the controller has its own custom PCB. Tactile switches on the custom boards are positioned just below the 3D-printed buttons, such that pressing a button toggles its switch. Each of the switches is wired up to a pin on a XIAO SAMD21 development board from Seeed Studio (diagram below). When SNES XL is connected to a PC (in this case a Raspberry Pi 4), the Seeed XIAO appears as a gaming controller icon and can be selected for gameplay.