Ephinea PSO BB on Steam Deck (Official Thread)

I was able to install PSOBB onto my steam deck about a week ago thanks to this video I had seen on YouTube from a user by the name of 1UPBebop. I enjoy playing a quest or two while I'm on a break at work. Finding out about Phantasy Star Online was like finding my golden ticket from Willy Wonka! I can't believe that Sega managed to make an amazing MMO and this game came out originally in December 2000. I love that people still play PSO and are continuing to allow us to enjoy the original content and also the user-made stuff as well. I highly recommend to Steam Deck users that you try the game out on a monitor/screen using a USB-C dock. I'll actually have my keyboard plugged in for chat and my PS5 controller works really well with the game too.

To those who can't get the game to work, you can do it too! I believe in you :D
DO NOT GIVE UP xD
 
Edit: I didn't realize until I went to install that addons are included in the download pack. I'll see about maybe figuring out palette manager too but for now I'm just trying to get it running.

Man for some reason I can't get lutris to even install its runners/updates. It just perpetually says "downloading...ac_runtime"

This is an out of the box steam deck and is nearly the first thing I did (aside from downloading steam games and updating the device). Irritating.

I used my wifi hotspot and suddenly it worked like a charm. I think my 5ghz wifi is an issue maybe?
 
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I'm super unsavvy.

Where do I set up the controls for in game? I saw there are some community ones, but I can't figure how to even pull up my inventory to equip something. Puzzled.
 
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disagree said:
I'm super unsavvy.

Where do I set up the controls for in game? I saw there are some community ones, but I can't figure how to even pull up my inventory to equip something. Puzzled.
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Do it in-game (you might have to press a few things to bring up the menu), or in the controller settings by hitting the Steam button while in game.
 
The recent update to DXVK for Vulkan in the Ephinea options has resolved the issues with the default installation settings with Direct3D. As such, to fix all the issues such as scrolling textures, simply change your default graphics renderer to Vulkan in the launcher.

I've updated the Lutris script to set Vulkan as the default in the Ephinea settings on install (and also not set Vulkan 1.10.3, since this is no longer needed), although it needs to actually be approved by the Lutris team before it goes live.

I've actually been wondering if I should do a second script that doesn't include the Lua addons - there's been quite a few people who complain about it and just want to know how to stop it occurring. Installing them isn't too hard in Lutris but it is slightly more than just drag/drop (have to set DLL overrides in Wine, which the script currently does for you).
 
Can't seem to get Alt+Enter to work in desktop mode, problematic since the on screen keyboard only works in windowed and playing in windowed isn't ideal.

Works fine in Game mode so it's not an urgent issue, just curious if there's a workaround/troubleshooting I could do on the off chance I wanna be in desktop mode.

Cheers
 
Ah, this is because it was removed unfortunately, so there's not much I can personally do about it. I'm not sure on the specifics of the Alt+Enter; it's part of dgvoodoo2 but I don't know if we can use it when running through Vulkan.
 
Sadly I can't get the Ephinea client to work on my Steam Deck through Lutris flatpak. When I try to run online.exe from Lutris, it pops up with a message window whose only text is patchclient.dll. Lutris log is attached.

Interestingly, the launcher DOES boot fine when run as a nonsteam game. Sadly the game won't boot through that method though, so still stuck.

Also, on my desktop, the game works perfectly through Lutris, so it's just the Deck that's being a pain.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the Tethella client with a newserv instance run on the Deck simultaneously works perfectly, so currently it appears it's just the Ephinea launcher.
 

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Got a Steam Deck and this was one of the first things I installed.

Mixed experience on the install, but got there in the end. The only issue I have is that it was installed with DirectX 8 selected in the options (should I change it? Seems ok) and the "add to Steam" works fine but the game has no icon or header graphic. A small visual detail, but I'd love to get this fixed too!
 
jake74 said:
Got a Steam Deck and this was one of the first things I installed.

Mixed experience on the install, but got there in the end. The only issue I have is that it was installed with DirectX 8 selected in the options (should I change it? Seems ok) and the "add to Steam" works fine but the game has no icon or header graphic. A small visual detail, but I'd love to get this fixed too!
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You can customize the header and icon graphics yourself on Steam. Just right click the header graphic and select to set a custom logo and/or background. Found my favorite art for both and assigned them that way.
 
A little update, while I couldn't figure out how to fix the patchclient.dll error in Lutris, I DID get the game working in Bottles. For reference, here's what I did:

1. Created a bottles prefix for the game, making sure NOT to have the prefix outside of the .var/app folder for bottles (as Flatpak won't load DLLs from anywhere else, for some insane reason).
2. Set it to use DXVK, wine-ge 8.26, and dinput8 override for native builtin
3. Installed the game in the bottles prefix, and added a shortcut to online.exe in the bottles interface (due to Bottles' devs not setting file associations right, you'll have to highlight the Filter text in the file picker and delete it, as otherwise both the installer and online.exe will be invisible); make sure to use the option in bottles' shortcut menu to add the game to Steam
4. Set the launcher to use DXVK, virtual fullscreen, and 1280x800; in my testing most post-processing shader options like Cel Shading and Bloom will crash the game so hard that you need to plug in a keyboard and hit Alt-F4, as it won't close otherwise; basically keep the fancy graphical effects in the launcher off.
5. Game should work now!

Why I have this issue while everyone else didn't is beyond me. At least I found a convoluted workaround to fix this.

I do really wish the deck had an option to outright disable the immutable file system permanently, which would persist between updates. Cases like this would be way less common if we could install Lutris directly to the root installation instead of needing to use Flatpak and dealing with the insane permission issues that come with it.
 
Got my Steam Deck a couple days ago. Setting this up was surprisingly painless! I made sure to log in on Desktop Mode first.

Also, I was disappointed that I probably wouldn't be able to use PSOBB Palette Manager, but the Community Layout "A.R.I. PSOBB Control System 3.2-SC" is REALLY intuitive! I may turn off the gyro thing though, cause it's a little much and I keep accidentally activating it when I reach for one of the back buttons.

I'm about to set up my lua addons, would it be possible to just... copypaste mine from my Windows computer to the Deck?
 
Turns out that you sort of can copy your settings over. I managed to get the font and color scheme, but since I needed to update most of the lua's I ended up having to reposition everything. Still turned out great!
 
Hey all, new to PSOBB here and heard from a friend that this might work on the deck!

So I followed the instructions and the install went fine, I can start it from desktop mode but I have 2 problems;
- Whenever I try to login through desktop mode it will say Invalid username or password, even though im 100% sure I typed it in right, since I just logged in with the same credentials on PC.
- The steam link through Lutris doesn't work. Whenever I click play in gaming mode simply nothing happens.

Can anybody help me out with this?
I'm horrible with anything linux related so have no idea what I'm doing :p

Edit:
Managed to get it to work using a fresh install with Salami's YT guide!
Doesn't seem to include working addons, unlike this guide though.
Can you explain how you got addons to work on Deck ?
 
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Hello, I have the game downloaded but I have one problem; it doesn't matter which platform I launch it in, lutris or steam, it doesn't boot the game up.
 
Hi all,
Firstly thanks for all the work on this - looking forward to getting it running on my oled. I get error 13 permission denied during installation via lutris, any ideas of a workaround? I read a bit about turning of readonly mode etc but unsure really if that's necessary
 
so I had the issue where game kept crashing at random, updated via Lutris, no crashing but I feel like deck is running hotter while playing PSO than previously, what is normal temps for y’all’s decks when playing pso?
 
Steam overlay controls don't work in gaming mode since lutris update. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem.

Edit/update: downgraded lutris & disabled lutris updates via Warehouse as a temporary fix.
 
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