Since I'm a junior member I'll post this here instead of in an official NeoGAF thread.
I took around 12 hours to reach >100.000 possible beta candidates after Valve's
second announcement. Since Valve decided to ship 300 Steam Machine prototypes the chances are pretty low that any of us will receive one of these mind-boggling Gabe Cubes.
But hey:
Soon, we’ll be adding you to our design process, so that you can help us shape the future of Steam.
Will I be able to build my own box to run SteamOS?
Yes.
Nah, I can't wait. Hence, I decided to add myself. Not only that I'm impatient, I also belong to the potential target audience anyway. I have an old Zephyr XBox360, my dusty old desktop hardware is listed below & I have to use my Macbook Pro 2010 for some PC related gaming (OSX or WinXP). You can see, this setup is not very future-proof and for most of the NeoGAF members presumably a nightmare.
I also collected a huge bunch of Indie-Bundles, which are mostly also playable in Linux - my Steam library would make a great launch title collection. Furthermore, I have no screen right now, only a LCD tv in my livingroom. I like to play with the terminal, but I consider myself as a pure Linux beginner with some google skills. And last but not least - I save all my dimes and hopes for the official Oculus Rift.
But first, the prototype(s)
While these official Steam Machines are still in development, I help myself. As always, I believe the best way to ensure that the right products are getting made is to do it yourself. Therefore, I have designed an old & low-performance prototype that’s far away from being optimized for gaming, for the living room, and for Steam. Of course, it’s also completely upgradable and open.
Here’s how to participate
Want to make yourself eligible to participate in the beta? Get some hardware, install a Linux distro and Steam & share your experiences in the future OT which does not exist ATM.
My hardware:
- MSI K8N Neo-4F motherboard
- AMD Athlon X2 64 4200+ Sockel 939
- 4x1Gig PC400 memory
- XpertVision Radeon X1950GT 512MB AGP 8x
- Samsung 4000Gig 720rpm SATA I
- 420W PSU
The X2 64 is one of the first dual core amd64 CPUs. My approach will be to build a Linux based custom Steam Machine. To everyone's surprise Valve decided to play it slow, hence SteamOS is not available right now. Therefore, my first step will be to install Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 and Steam for Linux.
In the future SteamOS is very welcome to join this beta as well. After reading a lot about Steam & Nvidia it's interesting to see how my Radeon will perform under Ubuntu and also SteamOS.
To further complicate my approach will use non-standardized and extremely inappropriate peripherals:
- Original XBox360 controller via Microsoft USB thingy - which is already a pain in OSX with wide ranges from bad to not functioning in Super Meat Boy, Pid & Limbo
- Apple Magic Mouse - a technical disasterpiece for any FPS
- Apple Wireless Keyboard
I'm looking forward to connected the dots, getting angry, try to make the balance and finally deliver more than the sum of it's parts. This post will be updated regularly. Here is my Steam profile and feel free to add me:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/rockpaperbird
//silent edit, because I'm sure that nobody will read this anyway
Wow, I'm surprised, everything was so easy and smooth. After installing Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 via
the USB installer, I installed Steam for Linux. No problems so far.
I learned, that I don't need the official Catalyst driver for my X1950. The GPU is to old and not supported. But it's alright,
the open radeon driver fully supports my chipset.
Steam was already running and I plugged Microsoft's wireless controller adapter into the USB port. This installation works well for Windows and most of the Steam games with controller support are good to play. But for OSX you need an
unofficial driver and half of the OSX steam games with full controller support are still not playable. Hence, I expected some troubles. To my surprise after synchronizing the controller with the adapter Steam started the Big Window mode automatically and I was instantly able scroll through the menu with the controller.
The games so far
I downloaded Waking Mars and FEZ. Waking Mars was just a short test if the framerate is alright if the game is not so demanding. I have no idea how many frames, but it was smooth. Happy and reassured I turned to FEZ - which is running good on my MB pro 2010, but you can also see some slow downs here and there (this is not the case when I boot into Win XP via bootcamp and play this installation). However, FEZ on Linux runs great. No problems and full controller support.
Now, I started downloading TF2 because I don't think that this will work well. Even my office computer (Dell workstation from 2012 with Nivdia Quadro GPU, Xeon CPU, and heaps of memory) has trouble to run TF2 in Ubuntu (around 8 to 10 frames), while the Win7 partition installation achieves with all settings at high around 80 fps.
That's it for now - I think I will test some more games for controller support during the next days & I'm looking forward to see Half Life 2 and Portal 1 & 2 in action.
//silent edit #2, because I'm sure that nobody will read this anyway
- Team Fortress 2 - at first I got this error message: "Could not find required OpenGL entry point 'glColorMaskIndexedEXT'! Either your video card is unsupported, or your OpenGL driver needs to be updated." - I found this discussion and one work-around. This helped, but TF2 is unplayable at 1 to 3 fps with lowest settings. Would be nice to know if the Source 2 engine supports older GPUs in SOS by default via new drivers.
- Half Life - no frame rate problems. The controller is not very usefull, but I can play with wireless mouse and keyboard.
- Amnesia - Playable with mouse & keyboard. I would expect more frames under higher settings, but my hardware is very old anyway.
- Proteus - the controller handling is great, also no problems
- Electronic Super Joy - pixel indie jump'n'run, controller works well
So far switching from Windows or OSX to Linux, installing Steam and play some games can be done within in one day. Usually, I could solve the minor problems by some google research. Connecting peripherals from Microsoft, Apple, cheap Chinese distributors was no problem at all - mostly plug & play. Older hardware works also, but the driver support for the GPU seems to be a bottleneck for playing source engine games (i.e. TF2, HL2). I wonder how GPUs with newer chipsets perfom.
