With all of that done, you should be able to launch the game and play with the desktop controller configuration. Your mileage may vary with the Steam Deck. This isn't practical for using the Steam controller as a normal navigation device, but it does avoid the problem of Steam not passing the in-game overlay to the Dolphin game.

You can do this in Steam -> Settings -> Controller -> Desktop Configuration on desktop Steam. It should look something like this: '/usr/local/bin/dolphin-emu' -b -e '/home/$USER/path/to/WindWaker.iso'įor the Steam Controller, I bind my desktop control scheme to the default inputs that Dolphin expects for a keyboard/mouse config.

In the target field, you should point to the dolphin-emu executable and the path to the iso you want to play. You can change the icon for fun if you like. It does not matter what this program is - you are going to manually override all of the information to point correctly to the game you want.Ĭhange the name to whatever the game is (e.g. This bypasses the Dolphin application menu, so you won't be able to change settings in this way without launching Dolphin from the desktop.Īdd any non-Steam program as a non-Steam game.

I'll tell you how I do it this way and bind my Steam controller inputs to the game. However, on Linux Desktop (and Windows too), you can create a non-Steam game shortcut in your library that launches a game using Dolphin's backend. I'm not sure whether this will be helpful with the Deck specifically, as I don't currently have one.

Dolphin emulator not running