Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older.
A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.
Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.
With a little fiddling most of those DirectX games work on the Deck. Again not perfect but absolutely functional. And never say never, fans find solutions to dead games all the time.
A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.
Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.