Valve's Proton Experimental Update Boosts Classic Capcom Game Compatibility on Linux

Until last week, loading Resident Evil (1996) on a Steam Deck meant confronting a crash screen instead of Spencer Mansion. That changes with Valve's April 10 Proton Experimental update, which pushed four long-stubborn Capcom survival horror titles into "playable" status: Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and Dino Crisis 2. The patch doesn't just fix startup crashes; it also restores FMV cutscene playback for the two Resident Evil entries, which had been silently broken for Linux users since the games arrived on Steam earlier this year after an extended absence.

The same update also cleared the path for From Dust, Metal Fatigue, Metal Gear Survive, and Warhammer: Vermintide 2, among others, and added support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64. But it's the Capcom quartet that matters most to anyone who's been waiting to play these classics without Windows.

Getting the fix is straightforward. Right-click any of the four games in your Steam library, select Properties, navigate to the Compatibility tab, check the box labeled "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool," and choose Proton Experimental from the drop-down. The update downloads automatically if you already have Proton Experimental installed; if not, search for it directly in the Steam store on your Deck.

Worth understanding what "playable" actually means here: these titles are not Steam Deck Verified. Valve's verification badge requires a separate certification process, and none of these games have cleared it. Proton Experimental itself is intentionally less stable than numbered releases like Proton 10.0-4, functioning as a rapid-deployment staging layer where fixes land before formal testing is complete. That means occasional regressions are possible.

There is one meaningful caveat specific to this patch. Dino Crisis 2's FMV cutscenes remain broken without a community workaround; the fix that restored cutscene audio and video to RE1 and RE2 did not fully carry over to the sequel. Steam Deck HQ's current recommendation is to launch Dino Crisis 2 once under Proton Experimental to register it in the system, then switch to GE-Proton 10-34 (installable via ProtonUp-QT from the Discover store) to recover those videos. Dino Crisis 1's cutscenes are unaffected and play correctly under the new Experimental build.

If a game still fails to launch after switching to Proton Experimental, the fastest diagnostic step is a clean prefix wipe: delete the game's compatdata folder at ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/[AppID]/ and relaunch. For persistent issues, ProtonDB's community-sourced game pages aggregate user-reported launch flags and workarounds by Proton version, and are worth checking before deeper troubleshooting.

The fixes will eventually migrate into a stable numbered release, as Proton Experimental always feeds upstream. For now, though, the dog jumping through the window in the original Resident Evil is playable on handheld Linux hardware, with full cutscenes, for the first time without serious tinkering.