Want to Get “Ultima V: Lazarus” Running On Your SteamDeck?

by WtF Dragon · February 6, 2025

About a week ago, Sir Bedwyr went looking for guidance on how to get Ultima V: Lazarus — the Dungeon Siege-based remake of Ultima 5 — working on a SteamDeck. With no answers forthcoming, Bedwyr went ahead and took a stab at figuring out how make the game work.

For those who aren’t aware, the SteamDeck is — at a technical level — a Linux-based device, running Valve’s customized version of Arch Linux known as SteamOS. Games are run through a compatibility layer called Proton, which began as a fork of the popular Wine compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux. As you can probably imagine, getting some games — especially older 3D games, like Ultima 9 and Dungeon Siege — to work in this environment can be a bit tricky, and getting mods for said games (like, say, Lazarus) to work trickier still.

Happily, Bedwyr figured it out:

So I’m able to add Dungeon Siege as a non-steam game by navigating to the DS exe directly and then applying a Proton compatibility layer (forces to 9.x right now). That opens up the launch options that I’ve used to get Lazarus running in Steam on Windows. But I’m trying to figure out if the options parser is expecting Linux style directory navigation or windows style.

<thinks>

I suppose I can look at how other directories are used with options.

So, if you’d like to get Lazarus running on your own SteamDeck, here are the instructions on how to do so (which can now also be found in an update to Bedwyr’s original Reddit post):

Preparation: You need to download a copy of UV: Lazarus 1.20 from a site. Currently two reliable sites are the ModDB and Ultima Codex (https://ultima5.ultimacodex.com/ultima-5-lazarus/). I recommend installing/extracting the file to a convenient folder on your Windows machine. Then copy the resulting Lazarus folder to a USB C drive. Copy the folder from your USB drive to the Steam Deck. I created a folder inside ~/Home/ called “Games” and put it there.

Boot into Desktop mode.

Find the Dungeon Siege executable (most likely in “Home/Deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Dungeon Siege 1” unless you have DS installed on your MicroSD card in which case you’ll have to look up the game path for that device).

Go to Steam->Games->Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library and click browse because you’re looking for the executable, not a registered native Linux application. Paste the path from (2) in and select the Dungeon Siege executable.

In the new item that’s probably in your “installed” games category on the left side, I strongly recommend going into properties and renaming the item “Ultima V: Lazarus” to separate it from the original Dungeon Siege which can still be played. While you’re in properties, go into Compatibility and force a Proton compatibility layer; I recommend starting with the latest version. For me In Feb. 2025 it’s 9.0-4 and works just fine.

Going back to the shortcut, if you pasted your Lazarus folder with all the game files to /Home/Deck/Games/, you’ll need to add to your Target launch options the following: “/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Dungeon Siege 1/DungeonSiege.exe” map_paths=!”/home/deck/Games/Lazarus/resources/” res_paths=”/home/deck/Games/Lazarus/resources/”

Adjust those paths appropriately for where you put your Lazarus folder.

Launch the game and hopefully it’ll work. You should have access to Steam Input and can customize the controls to your liking. I like to use the left touchpad as a mouse wheel and the right touchpad as the mouse, but YMMV.

And yes, the image above is an actual photo of the SteamDeck displaying the Lazarus main menu.

Many thanks to Bedwyr for taking on the challenge — configuring Arch Linux is not for the faint of heart! — of getting this running, and for sharing details on how to do so.