05-09-2023, 03:16 AM
I got a Steam Deck a few months ago on which I loaded up EmuDeck shortly after, and it has been serving as my main emulation machine ever since. I was fairly familiar with Wii emulation via Dolphin ahead of getting the Deck as I had used the emulator for several years on my main Window PC, which is currently equipped with a Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3080, and 2 sticks of RAM totalling 16GB of DDR4-3600. On the main PC, Dolphin works very smoothly, including when using my Mayflash Dolphinbar and off-brand TTX Wii remotes that I got around a year ago. In that time frame, my main PC has crashed or frozen a total of maybe three or four times (typically when tinkering with settings much more than I should), whereas my Steam Deck that I've had for much less time has frozen--subsequently requiring a force exit--numerous times: at least once per session with the same equipment and ROMs. Every incident Dolphin has stopped working on my Steam Deck has involved a sudden freeze in the software that requires a manual exit, so every time I refer to a "crash" from here on out will imply a software freeze.
I apologize for the long background, but crashes on my Steam Deck usually occur well within an hour of playtime, and appear to happen more consistently when using multiple Wii remotes connected to the Dolphinbar and using the "Real Wii Remote" setting in Dolphin. It's also hard to tell if that is correlated, though, because I almost always use Dolphin on the Deck for multiplayer party games with real Wii remotes. I've experienced several crashes when using an Xbox One controller in singleplayer as well, but these typically occur after over an hour of playing or not at all. I've not been able to deduce anything in the settings that would be causing this issue, and the crashes seem to happen at completely random points--sometimes at a willy-nilly point in a game, sometimes in a game's menus, and sometimes mid-rumble of a Wii remote, causing it to keep rumbling for the infinite duration of the crash until Dolphin is next launched. Save data has always been preserved in these incidents, but it can be quite inconvenient to have to repeatedly launch games and occasionally lose progress in games that do not auto-save mid-match. I've updated my system software and Dolphin's version several times since I got the Deck a couple months ago, but it has continued almost always crashing at least once per play session.
Is there a possibility that I need to change some system settings on the Steam Deck or settings within Dolphin Emulator compared to how they were automatically set with the install of EmuDeck? It doesn't appear to be a performance issue as games run at a pretty consistent framerate when set to 720p. I've done very minor tinkering on system settings and Dolphin settings to presumably optimize performance, such as increasing the RAM swap size on the Steam Deck and changing small graphical settings on a game-by-game basis in Dolphin, but no settings have appeared to make crashing any more or less frequent. I appreciate any help that y'all can provide, and I do hope it would be possible to alleviate or drastically reduce my crashing issues on the Steam Deck, especially as it only seems to exist within Wii games on Dolphin, and not on any other emulators or optimized native games.
I apologize for the long background, but crashes on my Steam Deck usually occur well within an hour of playtime, and appear to happen more consistently when using multiple Wii remotes connected to the Dolphinbar and using the "Real Wii Remote" setting in Dolphin. It's also hard to tell if that is correlated, though, because I almost always use Dolphin on the Deck for multiplayer party games with real Wii remotes. I've experienced several crashes when using an Xbox One controller in singleplayer as well, but these typically occur after over an hour of playing or not at all. I've not been able to deduce anything in the settings that would be causing this issue, and the crashes seem to happen at completely random points--sometimes at a willy-nilly point in a game, sometimes in a game's menus, and sometimes mid-rumble of a Wii remote, causing it to keep rumbling for the infinite duration of the crash until Dolphin is next launched. Save data has always been preserved in these incidents, but it can be quite inconvenient to have to repeatedly launch games and occasionally lose progress in games that do not auto-save mid-match. I've updated my system software and Dolphin's version several times since I got the Deck a couple months ago, but it has continued almost always crashing at least once per play session.
Is there a possibility that I need to change some system settings on the Steam Deck or settings within Dolphin Emulator compared to how they were automatically set with the install of EmuDeck? It doesn't appear to be a performance issue as games run at a pretty consistent framerate when set to 720p. I've done very minor tinkering on system settings and Dolphin settings to presumably optimize performance, such as increasing the RAM swap size on the Steam Deck and changing small graphical settings on a game-by-game basis in Dolphin, but no settings have appeared to make crashing any more or less frequent. I appreciate any help that y'all can provide, and I do hope it would be possible to alleviate or drastically reduce my crashing issues on the Steam Deck, especially as it only seems to exist within Wii games on Dolphin, and not on any other emulators or optimized native games.