The Deck
A deck is a mini PC. We build for the whole machine.
A deck is a screen, a battery and a gamepad — and on some units that gamepad is modular, built to come off. Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go, MSI Claw and the rest of the category are not consoles. Underneath the shell each one is an x86 PC in the same silicon class as a thin-and-light laptop. Being able to hold a machine this capable doesn't make it less of a computer; it makes it available in more places than a computer usually is.
The software has not kept up. Almost everything written for these machines aims at gaming, so the rest of what they can do sits idle — premium, high-power units running one workload out of the many they are capable of. The Deck is DataRail's work on that gap: treat the handheld as the mini PC it already is, and build the software that unlocks it.
Field capture of these machines doing work that isn't a game.
Showcase. Shot on the rail campaign, on the hardware itself.
- Test fleet
- Legion Go · Legion Go 2
- Awaiting units
- Steam Deck · ROG Ally · Claw — partner with us
- Status
- Phase 0. Nothing shipping yet.
Tandem — an interoperability platform for two decks
Our first project, and the one with hardware behind it. Tandem links two Legion Go hardware units — whether that is gen 1, gen 2, or cross-gen — directly, with no router, no internet and no account, and either unit able to hold the master role. Full design, transports, modes and honest status.
Read the Legion Go projectThe thesis
Portability was never the compromise.
The category is written about as toys. Four things follow from taking the hardware at face value instead.
Real x86, real operating system
Windows on the Ally and the Legion Go, Linux on the Steam Deck — either way a general-purpose OS on general-purpose silicon. Compilers, editors, capture software and servers all run. The form factor only changes where you can be while they do.
Laptop-class silicon, and then some
Eight-core APUs, 16 to 32 GB of fast memory, NVMe storage, and on the newest units an NPU. This is not a phone SoC with a controller glued on — it is the hardware people already do work on.
USB-C that carries more than power
DisplayPort out and data on every unit in the class; on some, full USB4 at 40 Gbps. That is docking, external graphics, and — the part nobody builds for — direct machine-to-machine links.
The software stopped at games
Launchers, overlays, frame counters — and a high-resolution touchscreen almost nothing uses for more than menus. Very little assumes you might want the machine to do something else. That gap is the whole opportunity, and it is a software gap, not a hardware one.
Platforms
One category, several vendors, no single answer.
The class shares more than it differs on, which is what makes a general programme possible. But the differences are real and we would rather name them than paper over them — the operating system, the port situation, and whether the controllers come off all change what software can assume.
Windows 11 on Ryzen Z1 / Z2 Extreme. Two USB4 40 Gbps ports and detachable controllers — the only units in the class with either, which is why the first project is here.
BuildingSteamOS, an Arch-based Linux, on a custom Zen 2 / RDNA 2 APU. One USB-C port with DisplayPort. The most open software stack in the category and the most different from the others — a port is real work, not a recompile.
Designed forWindows 11 on Ryzen Z2 silicon, with an NPU on the Ally X. Closest to the Legion Go from a software point of view — most of what we build for one should move across with modest effort.
Designed forA long tail of Windows handhelds, including Intel-based units. Same argument applies; we make no specific claims until something has actually been run on one.
WatchingManufacturers & partners
Put a unit in the field and find out what it does.
DataRail is a working campaign, not a shop window. It moves by rail between US markets and builds software on the hardware while it travels — trains, stations, hotel rooms, no-signal stretches. The conditions a handheld actually gets used in are the conditions we develop in, which is a rarer test environment than a review bench and a considerably less forgiving one.
One Legion Go and one Legion Go 2 is the entire fleet today. Every other platform on this page is waiting on hardware — and that is the specific, solvable thing a partnership fixes.
Software built for your platform
A unit in hand turns a designed-for row into a shipped port. The work is already specified; what is missing is the device to run it against.
Testing in conditions nobody runs
Thermals on a moving train, battery against real duty cycles, radios in dense RF, docking somewhere with one outlet. Months of field hours rather than a week with a review sample.
Results published either way
Findings go up whether they flatter the hardware or not — that is what makes them worth reading, and it is the same standard this page holds itself to. No embargoed praise.
Footage and documentation
The campaign captures as it goes. Your hardware appears in the showcase doing work that isn't a game, with the write-ups and the video to go with it.
The ask is small. One unit per platform — loan or retail, we are not precious about which. A Steam Deck, an Ally, a Claw. That is the whole distance between a design document and shipped software for that device, and we will say publicly where the unit came from.
Until one is in hand, a platform stays marked designed for on this page. We are not going to claim support for hardware we have never run the software on — a design that has not met the device is a hypothesis, and shipping it as anything else would waste your time as well as ours.
First project
Tandem — start with the link.
The first thing worth building is the thing that connects two machines. Tandem links two Legion Go hardware units — two gen 1s, two gen 2s, or one of each — and lets them find each other, trust each other and share work with nothing else in the room. Cross-gen is not a special case in the design; it is the same code path, which is the point of building it symmetrically. The principles below are not Lenovo-specific; the implementation is, for now, because the hardware is.
Either unit can be master
One binary runs identically on either generation, so any pairing of two units works the same way. Master is a role claimed at link-up, not a setting baked into a device — and it can move to the other unit without tearing the link down. Neither machine is the server.
The role expires by default
Mastership is a ten-second lease renewed every three. A unit that stops hearing from its partner reverts to being an ordinary handheld on its own, which is what stops a dropped link from freezing a device.
The one in your hands wins
Releasing control is always available on the client and never needs the master's cooperation. Both devices belong to the same person; an asymmetry you could not override would be a design smell.
Paired once, trusted after
A six-digit code confirmed on both screens, a key exchange, then each unit pins the other's key. A direct wireless group is still a broadcast in a public room; shared ownership does not make the air private.
Beyond gaming
What a second machine is actually for.
Own two decks — any two — and you have two independent x86 machines, two screens and two batteries. Linked, that stops being a current device and an old one and starts being one modular system. Several small things sharing a link beat one big feature.
Offline clipboard
Copy on one, paste on the other, with no account and no internet. A real gap in Windows, and a small amount of code.
File beam
A drop zone that is resumable and hash-verified, moving at link speed rather than Bluetooth speed.
Library share
Expose one unit's SSD or microSD to the other and work from it directly. No router involved.
Controller passthrough
Where the controllers detach, they become input for the other machine — or for whatever else needs a control surface. Legion Go only, because it is the only one that comes apart.
Second-screen panel
Reference, telemetry, a terminal or a chat window on one deck while the other does the work. Cheaper to build than mirroring, and probably used more.
Virtual LAN
Forward broadcast and multicast across the link so software that discovers peers by UDP finds them with no router present.
Status
Nothing is shipping yet.
The Deck is a programme, not a product page. Publishing a design is not the same as publishing software, and this page would be worth less if it pretended otherwise.
Tandem, Phase 0. Measuring whether a direct device-to-device link is reliable on the two adapters we have, before any daemon gets written. The detail is on the Legion Go page.
Hardware for the other platforms. No Steam Deck, no Ally, no Claw. Until that changes, everything said about them here is design intent rather than tested behaviour.
USB4 host-to-host. The Legion Go has the ports; whether Windows will expose a host-to-host network across them on AMD controllers is unverified. If it works, it changes what everything else can assume.
Anything to download. There is no build, no installer and no release, on any platform. When there is, it will say so here.