TUTORIALS Gaming
Play Steam games on your Raspberry Pi
Les Pounder has just had his living room redecorated after a nasty flood – what better way to celebrate than by shooting aliens?
STEAM LINK
Credit: https://github.com/ValveSoftware
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blog about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es.
YOU NEED
Pi 3B+ or Pi 4
16GB SD card
Network
A PC running Steam
A wired gamepad
Linux gaming used to be a laughing stock. Tux Racing or Neverputt used to be the limits of our entertainment. But over the years, games have been ported and created for our favourite operating system. And then something marvellous happened. Valve’s Steam Deck is a portable gaming machine powered by a custom AMD APU – but, more importantly, it runs a Linux OS. Using a mixture of Proton configurations, Steam OS can run many Windows games. Not every game is supported (we’re looking at you, Call of Duty) but there are more and more being added to the ProtonDB site.
The problem with Steam Deck is that it is expensive – around £350 for the base model. But what if you had a spare Raspberry Pi laying around? Steam Link is an application that can turn a Raspberry Pi into a game-streaming device. All we need is a good network connection and a gaming PC on the same network. In essence, our Raspberry Pi is sending our inputs to the PC, which controls our game then streams the resulting video and audio feed to our Raspberry Pi, which is connected to a big TV in the sitting room. So, we can frag noobs from the comfort of our sofa.