I am considering the new OLED deck, but one thing that will be a huge hassle is if I have to reiinstall the Steam library. Currently, I have my steam library only installed on SD cards (the internal drive is used for the OS, utilities and shaders, etc…). So when I want to play a game I drop in the appropraite SD card like a Nintendo Switch and the Deck detects the games automatically because the install path is saved to some configuration file.
However, I am wondering if I were to upgrade to the Switch OLED, is there anyway to transfer over the installation files so that I can continue to just drop in SD cards with the games? I know that it is possible to link games to a different install folder in the new OLED, but even that will take a very long time as I have to go through each game on each SD card and I believe Steam will also go and verify each and every game. I am hoping there is a way to fool the new OLED just continuing to run as if all the games are installed on the SD cards (beacuse they are)?
Right now there are at least two different reviewers saying two different things on this topic. The first, and here I forget if it was Retro Game Corps or ETA Prime (I think it’s RGC) who said they did a straight up SSD transfer (i.e. no copying nothing), and it worked perfecto.
But Taki Udon says he did the exact same thing and there were some glitches such as hardware issues that he thinks Valve will eventually fix if we are patient.
So one guy says works fine, the other says will probably work fine in the future but not now. We will have to wait and see I guess?
BTW, if a straight SSD transfer were to work, then it would be the simplest way to transfer (you’d just do an SSD swaparoo between the two decks). Or you could use Macrium Reflect to duplicate on of the SSDs if you didn’t want to swap.