japanese

[Unfinished] Turning Steamdeck into a Japanese immerison machine by dual booting Windows

Autumn Skerritt

08 May 2026 • 9 min read

Photo by Brian McMahon` / Unsplash

😋

This article is unfinished

The dream of being able to immerse in Japanese games using all the tools you love (GSM, Luna, JL) on a handheld device has simply not been possible.

Until now.

This blog post will show you, reader who already has an immersion setup on Windows, how to do the exact same thing on the Steamdeck.

But on Steamdeck.

We're going to do this by dual-booting Windows and SteamOS on the Steamdeck.

But firstly, why dual-boot and not go full Linux?

But they are workarounds.
Pretty much every immersion tool you love is on Windows.
Combining immersion tools that work on Windows with VNs that only work on Windows, and trying to do that on Linux is neigh on impossible.

So why not go full Windows?

SteamOS is specifically made for the Steamdeck.

I know I do!

If you want to attempt the Linux only way™️, read this:

💡

This guide is for people that can comfortably dual boot Linux and Windows, but do not know specifically how to do it on Steamdeck.

Also I assume you have already done the whole TheMoeWay/Refold/AJATT/Migaku/whatever thing on Windows desktop and you just got a Steamdeck for Christmas.

SteamOS Beta

You should join the SteamOS Beta.

This is because it has BIOS drivers you need to make it work on Windows.

To update to beta, press the Steam button or open the Steam menu.
Select the Settings option.
Go to the System option.
Select Beta participation.
Change the System update channel from Stable to Beta.
Restart and apply the update.

Steamdeck password

You need to set a Steamdeck password to do adminy things.

Follow this:

Installing Windows

If you want a more hand-holdy video, this is good:

🐬

You can right click by touching the screen and long pressing.

You need this to resize your partition.

🤔

Hold volume up and press power button once to load the boot manager.

Use KDE partition manager in the repair image.
I chose 11 IOT as it uses less resources, and 11 has great touch support.
Put them onto a USB and install them:

Look for "setup information" file type, right click and "Install".

It should boot back into Windows.

Connect to WiFi and install Windows updates.

Now after doing that, restart the steamdeck.

Go back to Windows updates, click on "Advanced Options" and then "Optional updates"

Update everything again.

Now let's configure Clover.

When you dualboot normally you can choose between 3 things:

Grub
Refind
Clover

I believe Clover has controller support whereas the others don't.

👽

just open this page on the steamdeck now you have wifi

Open cmd as admin.

bcdedit -set {globalsettings} highestmode on

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation" /v RealTimeIsUniversal /d 1 /t REG_DWORD /f

Sets hardware clock to UTC rather than local time.

If you have ever dual booted Linux and Windows you know this is required.

Linux typically assumes the hardware clock is set to UTC and converts to local time in software
Windows typically assumes the hardware clock is set to local time directly
When you switch between OSes, each one "corrects" the clock based on its assumption, causing the time to jump forward or backward

Now shut down your Steamdeck, go into boot manager and boot into SteamOS.

Follow this video to fix it :)

😶‍🌫️

Note: If you see a black screen press "A" if you followed that video.

There were some status.txt

In the docs it says:

Use this only if you have Windows installed on microSD / external SSD and if Windows keeps hijacking the bootloader!

Since I don't use that, I don't care.

Optimise Windows

Now Windows should work fine, let's optimise it to work even better.

Your life will be much easier.

Here's what I did:

Ran all Standard tweaks.
1. Additionally disable Background Apps (to speed things up)
2. Disable Bing search in start menu
3. Show hidden files and extensions
4. Enable S3 sleep (this makes the Steamdeck hibernate)

💡

On modern Windows, it will not hibernate by dumping RAM into a file and then reopening that file when you turn the device back on.

Modern hibernate will let Windows install updates etc

This burns through battery life.

Enable S3 sleep in Chris Titus' tool, and then do this to add hibernate to Steamdeck:
Open Control Panel → Power Options
Click Choose what the power buttons do (left sidebar)
Click Change settings that are currently unavailable
Check Hibernate under "Shutdown settings"
Change "Power button sleeps" to "Power button hibernates"
Click Save changes

Update: Hibernate breaks dualboots, use "Sleep" instead.

Disable All Updates:

Dual booting often breaks because Windows update breaks it.

I will disable all updates, but Windows Defender will still update its threat lists in the background so it's not all terrible.

On the Config page do this:

Set Up Autologin so you can just go straight to gaming.
All .Net frameworks.

In apps install:

Anki
Visual C++ 2015 64bit
7zip

Now open Powershell in admin and run this:

Set-WinSystemLocale -SystemLocale ja-JP

Japanese games require Japanese locale :)

And do this:

Open Settings → Time & language → Language & region
Under "Country or region", select Japan from the dropdown

While you're there, also install Japanese language support.s

Mining Games

Now let's set up our mining stuff.

Anki

Set up Anki and login, sync or whatever.

Go to your Anki addons folder on Desktop (assuming you have it)

C:\Users\Bee\AppData\Roaming\Anki2\addons21

It all works.

GSM

We'll be using GameSentenceMiner.

Go to this and install it:

Disable texthooker on startup.

💡

Only use Silero, it is much lighter.

💡

Actually set this to webp, avif requires reencoding.

I play visual novels so I don't need them to be animated 😄

But if you play games, activate animation!

I set AI up:

💡

Actually I moved to using TranslateGemma 4b on Ollama for offline translation.

Install Ollama, open it, select TranslateGemma:
https://ollama.com/

4b takes around 5 seconds to run, 12b takes 30 seconds but lags a lot.

In GSM AI set it up to use Ollama and then TranslateGemma.

Then set MeikiOCR in Overlay:

Meiki is Japanese specific so it uses less resources than OneOCR and on GPU it's faster.

In Advanced:

Close GSM and reopen it, my OBS was not synced properly until I did this the first time.

In OBS go to settings, output and then set these:

Now in Video tab:

Basically all these settings say:

I am playing a visual novel that does not move very fast, give me much lower settings to preserve battery life etc.

Finally in GSM enable "Start Overlay on Startup":

Open GSM Overlay and set Yomitan up, just export your settings from your desktop and move them over.

💡

Yomitan will check every dictionary you have installed before showing you "Add to Anki".

To save power I just run 4 dicts:
Jitendex (definitions)
Kanjidic
Jiten freq
GSM Character Dict (talked about next).

I also tell Yomitan to only show definitions from max 1 dictionary. This is because Yomitan loads every dict before letting you do anything, which can take some time and power to do

Pro GSM tip:

Go to settings -> Database Management and download the special Yomitan dictionary for character information in your games!

While you're here, set up Jiten reader. Use this for Custom Word CSS to make it look normal. The default CSS is horrific to look at.

.jiten-word.new { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.blacklisted { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.mature { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.due { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.young { color: inherit !important;}

Also in settings for Websocket remove all Websockets apart from 2333.