As far as the nature of the handheld is concerned, players will inevitably compare Valve’s Steam Deck with Nintendo’s Nintendo Switch, and some players even designed a set of NS-themed casings for Steam Deck. However, a A YouTuber named SpikeHD decided to take a more direct approach, trying to transform the NS console into a Steam Deck.
Even though it was impossible in many ways, SpikeHD chose to try to install the Steam platform on this Nintendo console, and showed the process in a 12-minute video, after a series of attempts , successfully extracted the “Nintendo’s magic” from the mainframe, showing the appearance of an ordinary computer under the mainframe system.
Before this, some players have successfully run the Ubuntu operating system on the NS host, so in theory, players can indeed run the Linux version of Steam on the jailbroken NS host, and then just enter the Big Picture mode, It will show an effect similar to Steam Deck. The first step he has to do is to install and run the Linux system on the NS host, however, this can only be done in older models.
In order to achieve this, SpikeHD must first install Linux on an SD memory card, and use the “carrier” (payload) based on USB-C to block the UI interface initialization of the NS host itself, and then let the NS host itself An electrical connector on a Joy-Con track got caught in a short, either through a perfect tool, or a paperclip.
Then, after going through a series of obstacles, SpikeHD finally managed to run the Linux system on the NS host, and even saw the mouse cursor constantly moving due to Joy-Con drifting. It is a pity that SpikeHD also encountered the limitations of the NVIDIA Tegra chip system of the NS host itself at this time. Tegra uses the CPU of Arm technology, while Steam can only run on processors above Intel or AMD’s x86. While SpikeHD can still force-install Steam, it won’t run any games at all.
In order to find other ways, the YouTuber then installed an Android system with a Steam Deck theme background on the NS host, as a record closest to the goal. Even though technically speaking, players can indeed transform the NS host into a Steam Deck, but considering the low hardware performance of the NS itself, even the Linux system has a very high degree of customization, it is difficult to play. Even so, it’s still a pretty interesting endeavor.
Reference material: PCGAMER