Up until fairly recently in gaming history, the line between the PC and the console was easy to distinguish. Consoles took input from a hand held controller, fed output to TV set, incorporated exact clones of each others’ hardware and software, featured split-screen multiplayer, and are priced for less than they cost to produce. PCs generally had none of these attributes. Thus PC gaming and console gaming catered to two very different audiences with two very different sets of features.
The lines have been…blurring as of late. Console have been catching up to the PC market in terms of performance, and the cross-platform releases which used to be rare and problematic are becoming increasingly common and elegant.
PC gaming company Valve’s new foray into the console space may render said line obsolete. Their aim is to create a console user experience with a piece of hardware that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a PC. My last post focused on the software hurdles Valve must overcome to expand the available set of games. But the hardware side of the story is equally important for their venture to succeed.
To this end, Valve has been partnering with multiple hardware vendors to create a set of specifications for a so-called Steam Machine. The idea is that in the not-too-distant-future, a would-be user would go to a retailer, buy a box, download some games, and start playing. No assembly required.
But where’s the fun in that?
Enterprising PC builders have long been cobbling together home brewed “set top boxes” for a variety of uses and applications over the years. These are just PCs strapped to a TV, generally running a version of Linux specifically tailored to this purpose. A home-brewed Steam Machine would follow this mold, and would just need hardware that could handle gaming at 1080p resolution. So let me just see if I have one of those lying around…
Oh, hey you!
Chris and John knew exactly what they were doing when they gave me this truly awesome wedding present last year. The full specs for this shiny little machine can be found here. The half-tower form factor and black chassis blended beautifully with my existing TV stand.
With the physical construction done for me, next comes configuration. The first hiccup I encountered was a lack of AMD support. When I first started testing this box, SteamOS only supported Nvidia graphics cards. You’ll see shortly why that is. But with Steam working just fine in the Ubuntu repositories, I left intact the 13.04 installation that Chris had installed for me. No need to fix what ain’t broke.
Once I had Steam up and running on Ubuntu, I gleefully set it to both start automatically upon boot, and start in Big Picture mode (the UI featured in my previous post). Shouldn’t have done that. Big Picture Mode on a Radeon card was not usable. When I tried to turn on Big Picture manually, it froze my entire OS about two frames into the splash screen. And of course, when I pounded the Reset switch, I was immediately thrust back into Steam Big Picture mode, just as I had instructed Steam to do. Whoops.
The only course of action at this point was to uninstall and purge Steam completely via a second virtual terminal session command line interface (yeah Linux), then re-install it. I had to do the rest of the testing for this post from a Desktop interface using a mouse to launch Steam games as one would on a PC. This works, but it still feels like I’m on the PC side of the line.
At this point, the results mimicked my earlier experiences playing Steam’s controller-friendly, Linux-compatible offerings. Since that post, Team Meat’s breakthrough platformer Super Meat Boy was brought into the fold. Playing a game with such a bright color scheme on a full-sized TV was a sight that my camera seemed incapable of describing (cameras are still poorly suited to taking pictures of LCD screens, and screenshots would add nothing to this conversation). Shank 2 was equally satisfying. If you haven’t noticed, most of the games available are either small-studio indie games or Valve products. But playing the recent Linux port of the gorgeous Metro: Last Light on a 1080p TV exceeded my loftiest expectations.
I played some of these hot-seat style with Danny, as I still haven’t found any good candidates in this mix for local multiplayer. This drives home an important point. Such as it is, the hardware component of the Steam Machine is easy to replicate (at least, it’s no harder than building a PC). The software is still the bottleneck. Since I went through the aforementioned rigmarole, Valve has officially added AMD graphics support to SteamOS. So for my next, I’ll be shedding Ubuntu to dive into a game studios attempt at an operating system! And with each passing day, it seems like another game adds some degree of Steam for Linux support. Perhaps it’s worth taking another walk through my library to see what’s changed. Stay tuned.