this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Steam Hardware

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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.

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[–] Rug_Pisser@piefed.zip 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Anyone else read 'four back buttons' and think "why do you need so many ways to return to the previous menu screen?"
Just me?

[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They don't have the same limitations that you have on a console. Steam input allows you to bind any button to the following things:

  • keyboard buttons
  • mouse buttons
  • controller buttons
  • system actions (volume, power, etc.)
  • controller actions (controller slot toggle, controller power, action layers)
  • steam actions

And probably one of my favorite but underutilized:

  • Games can also provide custom actions that show up in the button bind menu, and they can be basic things like "jump" or really bizarre things like "make character think." Games can have built-in action layers as well, so you can bind buttons multiple times for different layers such as "in combat", "in a menu", "dialog", etc. which means you can have contextual actions be different to match your comfort (think PlayStation × vs o regional differences in-menu and in-game where o is confirm in menus but × is the main action button in combat).
[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

Steam Input is awesome, and rarely gets the love it deserves.

I remember what it was like back when it was a toss up as to whether or not a game was going to recognize my controller without some additional program that maps keyboard keys to controller bottoms.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

The cool thing is, that you can assign the buttons any function. I use RetroArch on my Steam Deck and the back buttons have some special functionality, such as open the RetroArch menu itself or enable / disable fast forward or slow motion. That's good to have, so that all other regular buttons can be used as a regular joypad without changing their functionality.