about
What deckport is — and isn't
Getting a loose, non-Steam game onto a Steam Deck and into Game Mode is more fiddly than it should be: copy it over, restore the execute bit the transfer stripped, register it by editing a binary file Steam guards, then hunt down artwork and name it by an app ID Steam computes internally. For self-contained native-Linux games — Godot, LÖVE, generic ELF — every bit of that is automatable. deckport automates it.
The honesty stance
built for the fun of it
The shortcuts.vdf reader/writer is tested for clean
round-trips and byte-identical idempotent rewrites, and the
deterministic-ID + artwork-naming approach is the same one shipping tools
rely on. But the full chain hasn't been confirmed on real Deck hardware
end to end yet — so seed recipes start at unverified or
needs-test, and nothing is marked
working until a real Deck says so.
How a recipe earns its status — and the one line only real hardware crosses:
auto-generated or guessed — never run
engine, binary & data files verified — but not launched
ran on a real Deck — the SteamOS build is recorded in verified_on
And the honest dead-end: Borked means someone confirmed it does not run, with notes on why — just as useful as a success.
Non-goals
- Not a Wine/Proton prefix manager — that's Lutris and Bottles; deckport hands off.
- Not a game store, downloader, or anything that distributes game files.
- Not a DRM-circumvention tool — recipes describe prefix config only.
- Not a heavyweight GUI launcher — the value is in being small and scriptable.
- Not dependent on a running server — the CLI works fully offline.
Credits
- Steam ROM Manager, SteamTinkerLaunch — the deterministic-app-ID pattern for shortcuts and artwork.
- Lutris, Bottles, Heroic — the mature way to run Windows games via Wine/Proton.
- ProtonDB — crowdsourced Proton compatibility data.
- SteamGridDB — the artwork source.
- VAPOR — the SteamGridDB artwork engine the fetcher is built from.
☕ Support deckport
This is a free, no-ads side project — config-only recipes, real artwork, no game files. If a recipe saved you an evening of fiddling and you feel like chipping in toward the hosting and the late-night fact-checking, it's appreciated. Entirely optional.
Buy me a coffee ↗Code is MIT; recipe data is open (CC0/CC-BY). Not affiliated with Valve.