My nightmare experience with Ryujinx and using a new SD card (for those who are struggling)

After 5 painful days of struggling with ryujinx, here is what I experienced and here are some issues I ran into in case you do too.

I got a new SD card and wanted to move everything over to my new card. I only use my SD card for emulation so emudeck was tied to the card. I did all my research like a proper lad and everyone told me “just format your new card, copy old card to new card, put new card in. Bam, you’re back to emudeck playing” It absolutely did not do this. You do need to format your card in your steam deck BUT some of emudecks files do not get stored on the SD card and if you switch your cards then things are going to be broken. The bottomline is you will need to unistall and then reinstall emudeck on the new card, that is the simplest thing to do.

However, I did not want to have to experience this again in case I get a 2TB card in the future, so I also found out that you can add a custom directory during the course of setting up emudeck via symlink (I just learned all this stuff so if the terminology isn’t in the right context, pardon me). This, I was told, would allow you to switch your SD cards between one another without breaking emudeck. The option to set up the custom directly comes up during the installation of emudeck and it will ask if your roms are on SD, internal or custom directly.

I set the custom directory up hoping it’ll save time in the future. Now, back in game mode my library duplicated every copy of my switch games, one of them worked and one of them didn’t. The shortcut that worked was pulling from ‘flatpaks’ and was starting in /usr/bin. I had no idea what this meant. The other shortcut was pulling up a blank and empty copy of ryujinx. After much trial and error I found out that I had 2 instances of ryujinx going on at the same time. When I uninstalled emudeck for the first time, I told it I did not want to delete my ryujinx emulator because I had put so much time in it (ultimately ended up deleting it many times after that). What this some way, some how ended up doing is adding my ryujinx flatpack version into Emulation Station but I could not make any adjustments to the flatpack whatso ever in emudeck. It was untouchable and existed of its own free will. I deleted the flatpack and it was still there. I just left it as it is and now my Emulation station access a ghost copy of ryujinx and works perfectly. I treat it as a back up. But what about the second instance of Ryujinx that was coming up? The one that was blank?

When I reinstalled ryujinx and it asked if I wanted to install ryujinx, it installed Ryujinx binary (This is found in your games section on desktop mode). The Binary one is the one emudeck is now using. Ok great! I added my keys, firmware, games etc. Go back to game mode, have 2 shortcuts per game still, one flatpack the other binary but the binary will not load… it looks like it wants too but it crashes. After many more hours it turns out that the symlink I used for the custom directly will not allow the shortcut to work. So either I set up the symlink wrong or shortcuts can not be launched if it is going through a symlink. The video I followed on youtube does not like SRM and he only used EmulationStation so the symlink worked fine for him. Bottom line, symlink equals non launching switch shortcuts in game mode.

I went back and deleted all the flatpack shortcuts and I now have a fully functioning and healthy Ryujinx. I reached out and annoyed several people for help. Please forgive me as my obsessed mind would not allow me to rest until those dad gum shortcuts were properly functioning. But there was so much wrong information from all kinds of sources that maybe my experience here can give some pointers for someone else who may not be savvy with this and is struggling. Love ya’ll and take care.