Steam ROM Manager is an efficacious utility that can be used as an all-stop solution for managing your emulators, displaying all of your external games, and adding artwork for every game from the Steam Grid Database. It curates the experiences very seamlessly, and the end-user can at times not tell whether they are playing an external game, or one directly bought from Steam. With the release of the Steam Deck, the Steam ROM Manager can be seen as a viable option in case you want to turn your portable console into a retro gaming machine. Setting up SRM can be a bit intimidating, but it is worth the pain.
How Does the Steam ROM Manager Work?
The Steam Deck packs hardware powerful enough to emulate all NES, Gamecube era games. This process is simplified by Steam ROM Manager, also called SRM. The manager supports a wide array of emulators like RetroArch, or any other standalone emulator. You can throw the installation path to your emulator while setting up SRM, and it will work. You need to download and set up SteamGridDB to access the official artwork for your games as they were published on Steam. SteamGridDB does all the hard work of setting up the artwork, so you don’t have to make something yourself or waste time downloading PNGs from the internet.
The way SRM works is by calling the respective emulator for any game according to the path you have specified. It then loads the game without the involvement. This is made possible by the “Add a Non-Steam Game” feature of Steam. Steam allows users to add any program, from Notepad to Google Chrome to their launcher. SRM uses this to add your emulated games. Once you launch a game from Steam, the workload gets dumped to Steam ROM Manager every time. SRM then continues the launch process from thereon.
SteamGridDB is just used for aesthetic purposes to display the artwork for the games.
Here are some relevant download links:
- Download Steam ROM manager: https://steamgriddb.github.io/steam-rom-manager/
- Download SteamGridDB: https://www.steamgriddb.com/
This is all you need to know about Steam ROM Manager. It is a great software that can be easily recommended to anyone looking for a quality emulator.