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Remember Steam Machines? EmuDeck founder revisits Valve’s TV console idea

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Remember Steam Machines? EmuDeck founder revisits Valve’s TV console idea

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The EmuDeck Machine is a crowdfunded, Dreamcast-shaped Mini-ITX retro gaming PC.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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Valve once dreamt of building Linux-based game consoles called Steam Machines. They flopped — but the dream eventually became reality as the handheld Steam Deck instead. Now, a particularly noteworthy Steam Deck enthusiast is reviving the idea of a console-sized Steam Box, one with his own retro gaming twist.

Rodrigo Sedano is the founder of EmuDeck, a program beloved by the Steam Deck community. It automatically installs, configures, and enhances emulators for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and other retro consoles so they work beautifully on Valve’s handheld.

Now, he wants to make it even easier. He’s preparing to sell you a console-shaped custom gaming PC preloaded with that entire Steam + EmuDeck experience, plus a wireless controller, all ready to go.

He’s calling them EmuDeck Machines, and he’s currently crowdfunding the idea on Indiegogo for prices starting at around $400 — with an incredibly ambitious promise to ship them in December of this year, just four months from now.

They’ll house (weak) Intel N97 or (stronger) AMD 8600G chips in a Sega Dreamcast-inspired shell, with four USB ports around front for additional wired controllers or peripherals. By overclocking the AMD 8600G’s integrated Radeon 760M graphics, he claims he can get what looks like Steam Deck-beating performance out of his pricier $700 model:

There are lots of reasons to wait before putting money down on a crowdfunding campaign, though. While I love EmuDeck, and he seems to have other software design, web design, and management experience, he admits to The Verge that he’s never shipped a hardware product like this before.

He says his US and EU partners are telling him that getting FCC and CE certifications should only take one month. His current prototype is just a Mini-ITX board in a wooden box, while he waits for his potential case manufacturing partners in Spain to deliver the Dreamcast-shaped console case he’s dreamt up. He’s planning to assemble the PCs himself, as a family business of sorts.

A note on crowdfunding:

Crowdfunding is a chaotic field by nature: companies looking for funding tend to make big promises. According to a study run by Kickstarter, roughly 1 in 10 “successful” products that reach their funding goals fail to actually deliver rewards. Of the ones that do deliver, delays, missed deadlines, or overpromised ideas mean that there’s often disappointment in store for those products that do get done.

The best defense is to use your best judgment. Ask yourself: does the product look legitimate? Is the company making outlandish claims? Is there a working prototype? Does the company mention existing plans to manufacture and ship finished products? Has it completed a Kickstarter before? And remember: you’re not necessarily buying a product when you back it on a crowdfunding site.

But I think it’s at least plausible because he says he’s not necessarily expecting to sell more than 100 of these as a side project — and because he says these PCs will use off-the-shelf parts. It’s a standard Mini-ITX desktop motherboard and chip, in an 8.66 x 8.66 x 2.55-inch chassis. (He tells me they will have an external 155W power supply.)

Sedano says he’s been building computers since he was 14 and sees this as a hobby, too, but he’s getting serious about it in a few ways. EmuDeck is now a registered limited liability company in Spain (we checked!), and he says he’s locked down several suppliers to make sure he’ll have the components. He’ll offer hardware support and a warranty, he claims.

He also may not need Valve’s support to make this a reality; the operating system he’s preloading is Bazzite, a promising fork of the SteamOS interface with a different underlying operating system (Fedora). I’ve loaded it on a Lenovo Legion Go and the ROG Ally X at this point, and I’ve been mostly impressed by how well it works. Bazzite founder Kyle Gospodnetich tells me his team gave EmuDeck their blessing, though Bazzite isn’t currently helping EmuDeck tweak the software.

It’s a little surprising we haven’t seen many Steam Boxes like this before, and Bazzite says it isn’t aware of any others in the works. Perhaps other companies have been waiting on Valve? The Steam Deck maker told us in late 2022 that it’s actually excited for other manufacturers to make small SteamOS PCs — after Valve releases a general image of SteamOS 3 for those manufacturers to use.

As of this month, there are signs that Valve’s getting closer.

If you’d rather tinker instead of looking for a turnkey console gaming experience, you could of course build your own Bazzite box with EmuDeck. Or, add an HDMI dock or hub to a handheld. Or, you could possibly even do what YouTuber ETA Prime did and turn an old Steam Deck into a mini PC.

Correction, August 30th: Sedano has corrected one of his quoted numbers: he says Hades runs at 30fps, not 60fps, on the Intel model.

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