There's no thread here on the Steam Deck since before it was even released so I thought I'd bring this up. But the Steam Deck, while not perfect, is overall a pretty great system for playing classic PC games in a handheld fashion on the go. What's surprised me most is that in a lot of cases, but not universally so, Proton is better at old Windows games than modern Windows.

Despite the 'Steam' name it in no way prevents you from installing your own software. A Flatpak install of DOSBox covers everything in DOS you may want to play. I was able to set up per game .conf files with their own autoexec entries so each DOS game I set up has it's own entry and game configuration. The controls are highly configurable so work on a 'lot' of DOS games. The main weakness is some games use a lot of keyboard keys and that's just never going to work well on a 'gamepad' layout. Even Oregon Trail, with it's many keys for functions is not great unless you want the on screen keyboard on all the time it's not workable. Also, while you can map the joysticks to send any four key presses depending on direction, that's it, you can only map four keys in the u/d/l/r directionality, so you can't map 8 keys for DOS games that used the Numpad for diagonals. Railroad Tycoon thus was not really playable since I could only build straights and 90 degree turns.

On the Windows front, it's neat. First, not every Steam game is really a new game or a Windows game. Plenty are DOS games sold in a wrapper for DOSBox and some are 20 year old Windows games that 'run' but have no QoL improvements. First, you can add the 'Boxtron' compatibility layer which swaps the default Windows DOSBox wrapper a DOS Game on Steam sells with and enables the Linux native DOSBox and lets the user configure it. Secondly there's Luxtorpeda which also swaps your old Steam PC games for open source builds that exist elsewhere. Buy Doom which uses DOSBox and it'll let you swap that for multiple options of Doom source ports. Get Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and it can swap that for OpenRCT2. Get Re-Volt and swap that for RVGL.

Then there's just Windows games themselves. The Steam Deck obviously has no optical drive so you'll need NoCD cracked copies of your games, it can be easier ot get a 'precracked' copy in some cases cause you overwise have to install through the Proton compatibility layer but it can all be done if you put your mind to it. I found The Sims 2, once installed and ready, 'just worked' better than it does on even my real Windows XP machine. Did some creative gamepad layouts and it works great. I have the 'NextGen' patch of Need For Speed III and that's just a great game in a handheld. What games work is not 100% and things with 'lots of windows' can be a big problem with how the 'Game Mode' interface interacts. Not a 100% flawless machine but still great in it's own right.