Many of you know that I have been following the SteamOS and Steam Machine initiative for a while. I am still a little hesitant about certain aspects of it, but I love the concept and honestly wish I had been selected to receive an official Steam Machine beta from Valve. I was not, which was disappointing, but I did not let that stop me. I build my own custom gaming PCs for myself and other gamers, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
With my PC building experience, I finally sat down and built my own Steam Machine. It boots directly into SteamOS and also into Windows 7 with Steam starting automatically in Big Picture mode. If you are interested in building your own machine, check out the build I posted last week. It is basically the same machine but with a few differences. Mine uses sixteen gigabytes of ram, runs Windows 7 because the local shop was out of Windows 8 licenses that weekend, and uses an MSI 750 Ti OC that I picked up for a huge discount thanks to a return.
How It Went
In a word, it went about how I expected. From reading the forums I knew there were issues, and this is still a beta. Even so, the experience worked well enough. I streamed several games from my main PC to the SteamOS machine and since I was only a few rooms away I did not notice any lag or latency. The real problems came when I tried to stream newer releases. Strider, Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 and Hawken simply refused to work. The stream would start, the screen would go black, and only the audio would continue. To recover I had to walk back to my main PC and close the game manually. It was frustrating, but I reminded myself that this is a beta and these kinds of problems happen.
I also tested several native Linux games including Serious Sam 3, Metro Last Light, Left for Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2. If you did not know I was playing on the Steam Machine you could not tell. I had more fun than I expected when I played a session of Left for Dead 2 with my daughter and son in my office while I played from the family room on SteamOS. Note to self, I need to arrange more family frag sessions.
During my testing I noticed the occasional frame drop, but only for a split second. I am used to sixty frames per second, so I usually notice when a frame dips, but it was nothing major. Because this is my own machine, I did not get to try the Steam Controller that shipped with the official units or the versions shown at Steam Dev Days. I used an Xbox 360 controller for Big Picture mode. Other than the usual mapping issues in Metro Last Light it worked fine. I also tried a wireless Xbox 360 receiver, but SteamOS would not pick it up, even though some users have had better luck. I will revisit that later. Hopefully the Steam Controller becomes available at some point, or maybe someone at Valve wants to send one over so I can keep testing. Or gaming. Either works for me.
Back on the Windows and Big Picture setup, everything worked the way I expected. My wireless Xbox 360 controller worked fine aside from the receiver installation. I played most of my library and even had my daughter jump in with me on Assault Android Cactus. I love this game. The only annoyance with this setup is when a game crashes or fails to launch. It throws you back to Windows and you have to reach for the keyboard to bring Steam back into focus. I really wish there were an auto sensing feature that corrected this.
Overall, it was an interesting experience and I am looking forward to the next build. I am hoping more games will support streaming and that media streaming gets added because I really want to try it. It could be a game changer for many HTPC and XBMC users.
