# Steam Console



## Sunray (Jan 8, 2013)

As a real adjunct to the crappy idea that nVidia have come up with, Valve have shown off their long touted console.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20949071

Expect HL3 to debut.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 8, 2013)

Hmmm...not sure how well this will do tbh but at least the console market is getting a little more interesting again...


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## Balbi (Jan 8, 2013)

Zero optical content - if it's got decent storage, then it's the step up from chucking fifty quid on xbox games.


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## Sunray (Jan 8, 2013)

Its not being picked up by the other major tech site who are live streaming all they find at the CES.

I wonder if the BBC got it wrong?  If valve cough in a funny way its pretty much gaming/tech headline news.


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## fen_boy (Jan 9, 2013)

Gabe says they're going to do their own http://www.computerandvideogames.com/385551/gabe-newell-confirms-valve-will-sell-its-own-steam-box/


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 10, 2013)

Apparently there wont be a standard, just different versions...sounds a lot like the 3DO which was a great success...erm.


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Jan 10, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Apparently there wont be a standard, just different versions...sounds a lot like the 3DO which was a great success...erm.


 
Well it didn't help that the 3DO was 4 times the cost of other consoles either.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 10, 2013)

Global Stoner said:


> Well it didn't help that the 3DO was 4 times the cost of other consoles either.


 
Bad business model was bad.


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Jan 10, 2013)

Basically they are PCs...I don't see the advantage.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 10, 2013)

Without a standard box they're going to find it hard to draw any mass market interest they need to ensure they survive.


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Jan 10, 2013)

Indeed. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 10, 2013)

Steam isn't exactly a the strongest brand when it comes to mass market consumer interest either...


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## Firky (Jan 10, 2013)

Every time I see this thread pop up I read it as 'Steam Casserole' which would IMO have been an excellent name 

My Steam account is ancient, I was one of the closed Beta testers for it - well before HL2 had come out.


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## Epona (Jan 20, 2013)

FFS, I'd rather build a cheap PC.  Hint - new releases tend to be £10 cheaper on PC than on the current market leading consoles, so if you find you have to spend £100 more building a PC than buying a console, you will have saved that extra cost once you bought 10 games.  If you buy 20 games, you've already saved a shit load of money over buying a console.

I fucking love Steam and use it for all my PC gaming needs, but there is no fucking way on this earth that I'm ever going to buy any console from Valve ever.  Ever.


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## fen_boy (Jan 20, 2013)

I love my gaming PC too, but the constant fucking around and knob-twiddling I end up doing to get it working how I want is time-consuming - I enjoy doing that, but I think that puts a lot of people off. On the face of it, this console would seem to solve that problem so I can see the attraction.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 20, 2013)

Funny. maybe it's just me but i've never had to piss about getting stuff to work. i've had maybe 4 or so games not work on me and those normally are really out of date stuff which would be a generation or two behind if on a console.

i get the idea of "it just works" but from what i hear consoles have their own fair share of problems with patches and loading times.

i'm not against consoles (although i am against exclusivity)  i just want to stand up for pc gaming.


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## Epona (Jan 20, 2013)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> Funny. maybe it's just me but i've never had to piss about getting stuff to work. i've had maybe 4 or so games not work on me and those normally are really out of date stuff which would be a generation or two behind if on a console.
> 
> i get the idea of "it just works" but from what i hear consoles have their own fair share of problems with patches and loading times.


 
Yeah me too Shippy, I build a PC and then it works for years, there's very little knob-twiddling (fnar fnar!) involved.  I currently have 2 gaming PCs, one for me and one for Nate, I built them both (for those who don't know, it's like putting together a meccano kit, or a 'build your own transistor radio' kit, which for those who are not old enough to remember, used to be popular amongst the 6-10yo age bracket around 40 years ago - anyone who thinks it's too complicated for them is seriously overestimating what it takes to do it, but I guess any console developer depends on that level of technophobia in order to sell their product) and they are still going strong, absolutely no issues whatsoever.  Possibly the worst thing that can happen is a PSU blowout (which doesn't happen if you have a good quality PSU), but how is that any worse than the RROD on an XBox?  At least with a PC I own it all myself and can buy a new component and fix it, whereas a console user just sits uselessly twiddling their thumbs hoping that someone else will fix it and send it back to them.


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## fen_boy (Jan 20, 2013)

I didn't say getting stuff to work, I said getting it to work how I want. I realise I'm possibly not typical in that I want to play the PC from the sofa and on my big TV and I'm probably one of life's tinkerers anyway, but I spent a long time farting about to get my PC just right for me. Also I'm not suggesting that any of it wasn't fun, I thoroughly enjoyed it.


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## maomao (Jan 20, 2013)

There's no real need to build a PC yourself anyway. Plenty of places will put together a box to your specs. Mine's a year and a half old, was very much a 'budget' box to start with, and while I have chucked some extra memory and a second hard disc in there it played every game I owned on ultra anyway (extra memory was just so I could leave torrents running in the background while I played games on ultra). I'd love to waste 200 quid on a fancy pants new graphics card but I really don't need one.


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## Epona (Jan 20, 2013)

fen_boy said:


> I didn't say getting stuff to work, I said getting it to work how I want. I realise I'm possibly not typical in that I want to play the PC from the sofa and on my big TV and I'm probably one of life's tinkerers anyway, but I spent a long time farting about to get my PC just right for me. Also I'm not suggesting that any of it wasn't fun, I thoroughly enjoyed it.


 
Yeah because putting an HDMI cable from your PC to your HDTV and using a wireless controller (if for some bizarre reason you'd prefer to use a controller/pad for gaming, rather than the far more responsive kb+m) is like.. so out there. 

No seriously, I am confused about what was difficult about setting it up the way you wanted it, and what took so much fiddling about to get right. It's one fricking cable to get PC output on your tv - the same as plugging a console into your telly. I have my PC set up so that one of my display screens (I also have 2 other monitors) is the TV, and it took one £2 HDMI cable and about 30 seconds setting it up in my GPU settings.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 20, 2013)

I kinda get it.  often you want your  work and internet stuff in one place  buy you gaming and tv thing in another place.  you can set up  your PC to be a gaming rig  but  you can also drop some money on a console.   i can see why people make that choice.


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## Epona (Jan 20, 2013)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> I kinda get it. often you want your work and internet stuff in one place buy you gaming and tv thing in another place. you can set up your PC to be a gaming rig but you can also drop some money on a console. i can see why people make that choice.


See that's the thing I'll never understand - if I can put together my own components in a box and have absolute rights over how I use it, there's no way I'd ever buy a product with limited rights on my ownership and useage. I'm inclined to think that even if I won the lottery and had unlimited cash, I still wouldn't buy a console. You never really own a console - my PC I can set it up how I like, I can change the hardware, I can put any software on it that I choose on it, although I do use a microsoft OS, if I really didn't want to use that I could use Linux instead, or any other OS that is ever produced.

Fuckit, if I were a good enough programmer, I could even use my own OS. Not that that's a likely scenario to ever happen, but the whole point of it is that _If I programmed my own completely new OS, I could use it without legal issues_. If I put different software on an xbox I could find myself in a heap of shit. I don't want some box in my home, that I paid for, that some corporation has rights to tell me what I can and can't do with it - that's just wrong. My PC is just a bunch of components that I bought, it's owned by no-one but me, I can do whatever I like with it. I believe that some people modify their xbox in order to do things with it that it was not designed for, which is apparently bad and wrong (in that it breaches the conditions of use) and can get you in all kinds of shit, from what I've heard. I have no such issues, I own my hardware and can use it freely for whatever I choose, with whatever software I choose.


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Jan 20, 2013)

Epona said:


> See that's the thing I'll never understand - if I can put together my own components in a box and have absolute rights over how I use it, there's no way I'd ever buy a product with limited rights on my ownership and useage. I'm inclined to think that even if I won the lottery and had unlimited cash, I still wouldn't buy a console. You never really own a console - my PC I can set it up how I like, I can change the hardware, I can put any software on it that I choose on it, although I do use a microsoft OS, if I really didn't want to use that I could use Linux instead, or any other OS that is ever produced.
> 
> Fuckit, if I were a good enough programmer, I could even use my own OS. Not that that's a likely scenario to ever happen, but the whole point of it is that _If I programmed my own completely new OS, I could use it without legal issues_. If I put different software on an xbox I could find myself in a heap of shit. I don't want some box in my home, that I paid for, that some corporation has rights to tell me what I can and can't do with it - that's just wrong. My PC is just a bunch of components that I bought, it's owned by no-one but me, I can do whatever I like with it. I believe that some people modify their xbox in order to do things with it that it was not designed for, which is apparently bad and wrong (in that it breaches the conditions of use) and can get you in all kinds of shit, from what I've heard. I have no such issues, I own my hardware and can use it freely for whatever I choose, with whatever software I choose.


 
You can do whatever you like to an xbox for your own use. Just don't expect to be able to connect to live or even be able to use MS software afterwards.


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## fen_boy (Jan 20, 2013)

Epona said:


> Yeah because putting an HDMI cable from your PC to your HDTV and using a wireless controller (if for some bizarre reason you'd prefer to use a controller/pad for gaming, rather than the far more responsive kb+m) is like.. so out there.
> 
> No seriously, I am confused about what was difficult about setting it up the way you wanted it, and what took so much fiddling about to get right. It's one fricking cable to get PC output on your tv - the same as plugging a console into your telly. I have my PC set up so that one of my display screens (I also have 2 other monitors) is the TV, and it took one £2 HDMI cable and about 30 seconds setting it up in my GPU settings.


 
I didn't say difficult, I said time consuming. Here's what I've done to get it how I want, I appreciate my setup isn't typical.

There were a number of limiting factors to the location I could put the PC and the space in which it could sit, these were mostly because the fen_wife forbid me from sticking a  large PC under the TV with all the other boxes, I know you can get smaller form factor ones that'd look OK under the TV, but as far as I could find out at the time these wouldn't give decent performance. This meant I was limited in case choice and had to look at cases with vertical exhaust, because of where the box would be sitting. I had to research all this. The spot I was left with is about 4 metres away from the TV and more importantly my AV receiver into which I would plug the HDMI cable so I had to install new cable trunking that would hold a network and hdmi cable. I then had to paint all that to match the lounge so it was as hidden as possible.
So then I researched bits that would fit in the case, this was reasonably straightforward, but again fairly time consuming if you've not done it before and requires at least some appreciation of the compatibility of various components. Also, I needed to be mindful of the vertical case exhaust when choosing graphics cards as they needed to have a rear exhaust.
So I got all the bits together and put it together, as you say this is like Meccano, the only problems I had was getting all the LEDs and whatnot hooked up to the correct pins, but not really what I'd call difficult. Installing the CPU and greasing it can be a bit hairy, but it all went fine really.
Then I installed the OS, this went pretty smoothly
Once it was working I decided it was too loud, so I researched quiet fans and replaced them all. 
Then I started fiddling with overclocking the processor, this took a while to find a stable overclock.
Then I started fiddling with overclocking the graphics card. I got a decent overclock, but decided it was too loud again so I put a quieter fan in above the graphics card and limited the graphics card fan. Eventually I found a decent balance between performance, noise and speed that I was happy with.
I didn't like the fact that I had to log in to windows at all so disabled password login to the machine and started using big picture mode on steam.
Oh I also setup the PC so it could be turned on using my universal remote, which also meant getting an IR repeater and extension, that took a while to get working.
I started off with an xbox controller. That meant another dongle, at the time I wanted minimal keyboard input so I got a small wireless keypad thing that never really worked properly. I went through a load of RMA problems with an Amazon seller about that, but it got sorted in the end and I got a different wireless keyboard. That keyboard never really worked that well so I ended up with more trunking to hide cables to move a wireless receiver nearer to me, more decorating to hide it.
I didn't have enough space on my SSD so I bought a second one, but my case only came with one 3.5 to 2.5 mounting kit, so I had to fashion my own to hold the drive in place in the second bay.
I then had to create links using mklink to setup this second drive to hold just my steamapps folder, this works pretty well now.
I've upgraded my graphics card since I got all this two years ago, so I did another round of overclocking and testing.
In the end I decided I preferred using the mouse, but not a keyboard. I thought I must be able to use something like the wii nunchuck in left hand and mouse in the right hand. I found that it was possible to use the ps3 move navigation controller to do something similar so I spent a while getting that set up, had to get two different bluetooth adapters to find one that worked, but it worked in the end.
I got a gaming mouse so I could map functions that would normally be on the right side of a gamepad or the keyboard, I need to create new mappings for each game on that.
I also need to create mappings for the move controller using motioninjoy and xpadder.
Sitting on the couch with a mouse wasn't perfect so I got a laptop tray with a slide-out mouse tray, but I didn't like the mouse surface so I got a Razr sticky backed one and cut it to size.
So now I have a small wireless keyboard (microsoft arc thing) mouse and nunchuck controller and play games that way.

There was also a lot of fighting with AMD CCC in amongst that as well as various other software tweaks I needed to make to get it working how I want. There's probably stuff I've forgotten too.

I'm now trying to get the general UI to be more consistent with steam as I hate seeing Windows when it starts up because Windows equals work.

Now, I obviously wouldn't have done all that if I didn't enjoy fiddling and a lot of it will no doubt be seen as unnecessary,but that's what I did and why, for me, it was much more than simply plugging and HDMI cable into an AV receiver.


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## fen_boy (Jan 20, 2013)

I thought of some more, sound stuttering problems in 2d- spent ages trying to resolve that, still doesn't work, some AMD driver problem. I was forced to edit config files to up the 2d clock speed on the GPU to work around it.
Also didn,'t mention the hours I've spent tweaking game INI files.


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