I Bought a 64GB Steam Deck and FIXED EVERYTHING WRONG WITH IT!

I bought a shiny new 64GB Steam Deck and I’m going to fix everything wrong with it. The obvious part is the storage – the 64GB eMMC drive that comes in this is far too small and slow to be a good experience, so seeing as I already have one of these Kioxia BG4 1TB single chip 2230 M.2 SSDs around, I’ll be installing this straight in before I’ve even booted the Deck. The other major problem with the Steam Deck is the joysticks. They are fine, but being potentiometer based they will eventually get stick drift. Since I’m opening the deck anyway to replace the drive, and since these GuliKit magnetic hall effect joysticks are relatively cheap at £30, I’ll be swapping these in too. Let’s crack this open and get to it.

Opening the Deck is remarkably easy. It’s four short Philips screws in the middle and four longer ones on the outer edges, then a bit of careful prying with some plastic tools gets the back cover off. You’ll need to peel this piece of foil tape up to remove the screw below it, then the two on the top and bottom left edge of the cover. The first step once the cover is off is disconnecting the battery. Pull the tab, or in my case I had to very carefully use some tweezers to push the connector free. Once that’s out you can unscrew the M.2 drive, swapping the RF shield over to the new drive. As for the joysticks, you’ll need to remove the ribbon cable to each one, then you just remove the three screws on each joystick board and it pops out.

To replace the joysticks, there is one extra step you’ll need to do and it involves a soldering iron. The joystick cap has a soldered wire that allows the deck to know if you are contacting the joysticks, and this cap needs to be transferred over. That means you’ll have to crack out the soldering iron to remove, then reattach the wire to the new board. I found I had to turn my iron up to hotter than I’d usually use, and I’m almost certain the old cheap-o iron I used to use wouldn’t have done the job, so be warned. It’s worth noting if you are buying official replacement joysticks from iFixit, they come with the caps pre-installed so you can skip this step. Once the caps are on though, installation is the reverse of removal. You drop it in the hole, install three screws, reattach the ribbon cable, then you are done. Remember to reconnect the battery and reinstall the shield, then clip the back on and install the screws.

Obviously, since I removed the OS drive, the deck is now devoid of an operating system. You’ll need a USB stick – either a USB C stick or a USB C hub to plug a regular drive into – and you’ll need another system to make that USB stick a bootable drive with the latest copy of SteamOS on it. You can get that from the Steam website, and if you are on Windows you can use a tool like Rufus to write the image to your stick. Then plug it into the Deck and boot it. Since the USB stick is the only bootable device it should boot up on its own, although if you happen to just want to reinstall the OS then hold the minus volume button down while you tap the power button, and it’ll boot to the boot selection menu and you can pick the USB stick there. Once it boots, on the desktop there are a few icons, I’m using the “Reimage Deck” option. This takes a fair while, and in my case I had to restart the Deck and mess around with the update to get it to actually install everything and boot.

The next thing to solve is emulation. Now because of a certain company I can’t show you absolutely everything, but I’ll show what I can. I’m using EmuDeck, a brilliant tool that instals everything you’ll need to emulate anything from an N64 to a PS3 – and yes even a Switch. Run through the setup as normal – I’m using internal storage for this as I’ve got more than enough space and using the standard install. A custom install would let you disable some of the emulators but I’m not too bothered. Once it’s installed, you’ll need a few extra things. Bios files, encryption keys and ROMs. For example, on the Switch, if you have an early model Switch you can use a tool to basically jailbreak it and extract the encryption keys. If you don’t – say you have a Switch Lite or none at all, you’d need to find the prod keys and title keys files somewhere. They aren’t hard to find. BIOS files are available on the same site for the Switch, or for other consoles again it’s a pretty simple search. As for the ROMs, again you can make backups of your game cards, or use publicly available copies. Again I can’t link you to any but they aren’t hard to find.

You’ll need to switch to desktop mode on your Deck by pressing the Steam button, scrolling down to Power, then “Switch to Desktop”. Open a file explorer window and navigate to your Emulation folder. If you chose internal storage that’s under Home. Inside the folder you’ll find folders for bios files and roms. Inside the bios folder you can drop your Switch keys and firmware in the appropriate folders inside the yuzu folder, and other game consoles if you fancy too. You’ll want to drop your roms in their appropriate folders too – a warning with Switch roms in particular. XCI files – aka cartridge dumps – work a lot better than the NSP – aka eShop rips – files. NSP files can still work, but it’s about a 50% success rate from the ones I’ve tried. And NSZ files – aka compressed NSP files – don’t work at all. Once those are copied, launch the Steam ROM manager. Click preview, then Generate App List, then Save App List. Once it’s done you can close it, then use the Return to Gaming Mode shortcut on the desktop and you should find your newly installed games in your games list. I should note, with a few tweaks, Steam now has native support for Joycons as both a single and pair configuration, so yes you can play with actual joycons. They just pair with Bluetooth, although you have to switch to desktop mode to swap between two single and one pair configs at the moment.

So that’s my new 1TB Steam Deck with hall effect joysticks. It’s an emulation powerhouse and I’m absolutely loving it. The various input methods, the handheld design and decent performance makes this an amazing machine. Of course if you were replicating this build you might be better off with a 512GB SSD instead to not spend over £200 just on the SSD, but I’m incredibly happy with my purchase.