A Steam Deck owner has created a cool SteamOS plugin that launches games when you insert a floppy disk or other types of physical media. The modder wants to bring back the feel of physical media collections, which is naturally unavailable on the Steam Deck.
To bring their vision to life, Reddit user BlackIceLA developed a plugin for Valve’s SteamOS that launches specific games when it detects related physical media. The latter can be any type of media regardless of its data storage capacity, since game files remain stored on the Steam Deck. In other words, the physical media is only used to trigger the game launch, using Steam game URLs such as “steam://run/730”. By the way, you can also paste such links into a web browser or Windows’ file explorer, and the game will automatically launch on Steam if you own it.
At first, the modder wanted to use something ready to go, like Zaparoo, but it turned out to be incompatible with their vision. For those unfamiliar, Zaparoo is a free, open-source software that turns cards, QR codes, discs, and more into shortcuts for launching games. Because of this, BlackIceLA decided to create their own plugin called Decky Links, with the help of Claude AI. Like Zaparoo, Decky Links works with many types of physical media, including USB drives, CDs, floppy disks, NFC chips, and even QR codes.
For demonstration, BlackIceLA used a floppy drive connected via USB plus a floppy disk containing the Half-Life launch URL. While the demo was successful in launching the game, it took quite a long time to trigger due to the floppy disk’s inherent speed. The modder said that other media is faster to launch games, with NFC tags being among the best.
Conveniently enough, whenever you remove the media, the game auto-closes, which adds to the illusion. BlackIceLA went as far as to print floppy-disk-sized labels to further boost the illusion. And in case you were wondering, the process also works with non-Steam games, assuming they have been added manually to the Steam library.
The modder said that the plugin works well so far on the Steam Deck. That said, it should also work on Valve’s Steam Machine since it runs the same OS as the Steam Deck. So, if you are interested in trying it for yourself or simply want to follow the project, you can check out its dedicated GitHub page.
