How to build a Steam Machine with Steam OS

GAMEPAD SETUP

We also had some glitches setting up a gamepad. We used a wired Speedlink Xeox pad, which can emulate both an Xbox 360 controller (using the XInput protocol) and older DirectInput gampads. In XInput mode, Steam OS picked up our gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, but the face buttons were all mixed up, making it hard to navigate the OS. Fortunately, Steam OS gives you many customisation options for your gamepad, letting you map each of the buttons on your gamepad to the ones needed by Steam OS.

We found the controller customisation section slightly flaky, in that it would sometimes refuse to respond to our inputs. We had to leave a keyboard plugged in as a backup until we had the controller set up how we wanted it.

Once all our gamepad’s buttons were the right way around, navigating SteamOS with the gamepad was a breeze, thanks to the onscreen button prompts. The interface is identical to Steam’s Big Picture mode on a normal desktop Steam installation. This is all big buttons and icons, and is designed for navigating from your sofa.

^ Setting up the controller was slightly fiddly, but it worked beautifully in the end

We did notice some quirks with the Steam interface on Linux, however. The Store shows all the games available, with no content filter for Linux games, so you have to click into each title to see whether it’ll work on your Steam box. There is at least an icon at the bottom-right of each title’s thumbnail, showing whether the title will work with your gamepad, but, at the risk of things becoming too cluttered, we wish there were also operating system compatibility icons.

^ We wish you could sort your library by gamepad and Linux compatibility at the same time

Things are better in the Library, where the games you’ve bought are stored. Games shown in the Recently Played section have an icon to indicate controller support, but the list contains all your recently played titles – whether you played them on a Steam Box or on your regular gaming PC. You can go into the View All Games section and select Linux games from the drop-down menu at the top to see which games in your library will actually work on SteamOS. You can also use this menu to filter by gamepad-supported titles, but you can’t select both Linux and controller-supported titles at the same time. We’re hoping to see more flexible ways to filter our library in the future.

This brings us to another potential drawback with Steam OS; Linux, as a mainstream gaming platform, is in its infancy. We found just over 300 titles available for Steam OS, but this is a far cry from the thousands available for Windows. You’ll also have to be prepared to be eclectic in your gaming tastes. Most of the games available are indie titles, such as Trine 2, Fez, Amnesia, Legend of Grimrock and FTL. This is no bad thing, of course, as many of these games are superb; just don’t expect to play all the latest blockbusters.

^ Steam OS has plenty of great indie games, but it’s not so hot on AAA titles

We did find a few major titles, such as Metro Last Light, and there is, of course, Valve’s back catalogue, with classic, if ageing, titles such as Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. Left 4 Dead 2 ran beautifully on our Steam box with maximum detail, and worked well with our gamepad once we’d enabled support in the options. We found one odd bug with Trine where if we turned on maximum anti-aliasing our character wouldn’t appear on screen, making it impossible to play. This was easily fixed by turning AA down to the “High” setting.