Got a cheap USB Nintendo 64 controller to use on my Steam Deck but unfortunately it didn’t seem like SteamOS recognized it natively. So I disabled Steam Input on Banjo-Kazooie to have the bindings set-up in RetroArch. Turns out though all I needed to do was restart my Deck for it to be recognized which was a huge relief. Problem is there is seemingly no way to re-enable Steam Input, the option is entirely missing compared to videos I’ve seen of people disabling it. I’ve tried restarting the Deck again, opening up desktop mode to see if it’d pop up there, switching to Preview, and even trying to run the old Big Picture Mode, but nothing. Thankfully there’s a pretty easy work around, I just added Banjo-Kazooie as another Non-Steam game with the RetroArch command and it booted fine with Steam-Input again.
I only managed to find one Reddit post of this issue and it was about two weeks ago of someone having the same issue in SteamOS 3.5.5 Preview, but I’m on Stable. I got lucky finding this out with a Non-Steam game, since I’ve accidentally disabled Steam-Input in the past on some games. Is there really no way around this? Can confirm this happens with regular Steam Games too and more reliable controllers, thank you Teddy Floppy Ear for your sacrifice.
If you pair a more official controller like an Xbox series/dualsense controller, the steam input enabling box re-appears. Then you can enable it for the game, and can then switch controllers