One Steam Deck owner has taken the portability of this gaming handheld to a whole new level by hooking up their handheld to their car and turning the in-built media display into an external monitor. While the results aren’t perfect, it now means that this gamer can play their favorite games whenever they’re safely parked up.
The Steam Deck continues to be the best handheld gaming PC that you can buy, striking the right balance between price and performance for a gaming device that fits in your hands. The portability of the device makes wild setups like this one possible, as long as you’ve got the best Steam Deck dock for the job to make it possible.
This car-gaming combo caught my eye via this Reddit post in the official Steam Deck subreddit. Redditor Twistedchild420 used a third-party CarPlay adapter, along with a USB-C to HDMI cable, to allow them to hook up their Steam Deck to their Genesis G70’s entertainment system.
The gamer then showed off a number of emulated games playing via the car’s in-built display. While the Deck itself doesn’t seem to have any performance issues, the only concern here would be whether the combination of the third-party adapter with a USB-C to HDMI cable creates any input lag. However, this gamer is shown playing a number of games quite successfully, suggesting that this isn’t a concern, at least for the older games they’re playing here.
While hooking it up to your car might seem like a step backwards on the portability front, I can absolutely see a use for this kind of setup, especially during those lunch breaks at work when you need a bit of time away from the office. The in-built media display used here seems good enough for this purpose, while it should be possible to keep the Steam Deck charged up using the car’s battery.
It’s important to stress that this setup obviously wouldn’t be recommended for use while driving, however.
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