Anybody on here have experience with the Steam Link? I’ve been thinking about it mostly to keep from dragging my PC into the living room to play point and click adventure games with my wife. But with SF V coming I might think about it to keep from having to sit at my computer desk to play.
That’s the $50 adapter, correct? I’ve thought about it myself but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. We ought to share experiences if one of us buys it.
Maybe after the holidays.
Correct. It’s supposed to stream from your PC to another monitor or TV. Even if it’s laggy as hell it will probably work fine for my intended use (playing point and click adventure games) but I was curious if it might be functional for other things.
Well @xSkeletalx I picked up a Steam Link and it arrived today. It seems to work great in terms of streaming games from my PC to my living room television. I thought I would test it out with fighting games and downloaded USFIV just for that purpose. I was able to play online (and win, which surprised me) but I discovered that the Steam Link doesn’t correctly recognize the fightstick buttons. I have 3 360 stick, one PS3 stick and an Xbox One stick. The One stick does nothing, the PS3 stick has all the buttons messed up royally and the 360 sticks all have the same problem. The Steam Link thinks the RT button is Start and the LT button is back. Unfortunately, USFIV isn’t able to deal with this because even if you remap the buttons it always pauses the game when you hit RT.
The odd thing is my plain old Xbox One controller works just fine and dandy. I’m thinking about opening up and switching the RB and RT buttons on my 360 TE stick just to use it with Steam Link.
Otherwise, the thing seems to work really well. It does occasionally crash Steam on my PC so it’s very much a “still in beta” product. But the core function seems to work smoothly and you can play fighting games online with it (if you get the controls sorted out…).
EDIT: I ghetto modded one of my 360 sticks to swap the LB button with the RT button. It looked like it solved the problem, but it the button wouldn’t get rid of some of its earlier properties in USFIV. It taunts (which makes no sense) and hits all three punch buttons even when it’s assigned to HK. I would say it was a USFIV problem but it doesn’t do this on my PC except when streaming to steam link. Pretty disappointing.
EDIT #2: I’m talking to myself here, but for the sake of completeness I got this sorted out. It turns out that in addition to messing up the buttons, steam link doesn’t know which of the 4 controller configurations you are using for USFIV. So it applies all of them. If you rebind all 4 controllers the same way, to the way you want them, it works fine. I haven’t tried local multiplayer because I haven’t had time to fuss with it, but I suspect this will cause problems. If you hit start while playing local you actually enter the game as player 2 and then pick both characters. When you enter the game the controller controls BOTH characters with the same inputs. Talk about a weird experience. I don’t know if this would get better if a second controller was plugged in. Maybe I will try later and make this post even longer…
I actually got a Steam Link over the holidays. Was interested in using it for games but I’m nervous about the lag (I’m not sure it’ll be easy to hook it up to a wired connection), and your experience with the sticks not working well isn’t super encouraging either. I don’t know very much about it though. Can you play with controllers that are still hooked up to your computer? As in, if you wanted to, could you effectively just use the steam link as an HDMI cable to your TV (that goes through your router)?
I appreciate the update!
How does it perform with other games, namely any strategy, action, “survival” or shooter games you might have? I was primarily planning to use it for games from those categories, as the fighters I own through Steam are ones I’m not really into. I mainly just play KI when I want to play a fighter.
I’m curious to see whether this would let me run something like TF2 or Counter-Strike: GO in my living room without too many problems.
You can absolutely control the game from your computer while streaming it to the Steam Link. This works no problem and the control issues I was having with the Link don’t manifest at all when streaming but using a controller plugged into your PC. So, using it as a substitute HDMI cable is no problem. Also, just FYI, it doesn’t only display games streamed through steam. Right now my wife is watching me type this on our big screen TV. So, that bodes well for you if you want to use it that way for KI (which I suspect won’t be on Steam).
My set up is that the computer is hooked up on a 5 GHz wireless connection (it’s a netgear Nighthawk router) just on the other side of a wall from the router. The Steam Link is wired in. I don’t see any appreciable lag when I’m using the controller hooked up to the Steam Link and playing USFIV online seems to be no issue. I was playing guys in Japan (or at least with Japanese characters in their names) with only occasional rollback. Control seemed good. Keep in mind I’m not doing 1-frame link combos on my best day, so your mileage may vary. But in my hands the performance is good.
[quote=“xSkeletalx, post:6, topic:3340”]
How does it perform with other games, namely any strategy, action, “survival” or shooter games you might have? I was primarily planning to use it for games from those categories, as the fighters I own through Steam are ones I’m not really into. I mainly just play KI when I want to play a fighter.
I’m curious to see whether this would let me run something like TF2 or Counter-Strike: GO in my living room without too many problems.
[/quote] I have only tested it using an Xbox One controller and playing Left4Dead 2, which I got as a free download. That game is a little wonky anyway and the controls feel very floaty to me. But I would say the performance is good. I haven’t dragged my keyboard and mouse in there to try something like StarCraft II since that’s not what I want to play in my living room. I just bought a little mini keyboard with a touch pad to play point and click adventures on (but as you know that won’t hack it for serious RTS games).
UPDATE: Just for anyone who’s interested. I have done some more playing around, and although the Steam Link has trouble with my Madcatz TE and Hori 360 sticks, it has no trouble at all with my brothers Madcatz SF X Tekken Pro stick. Strange but true - so it may well work with newer madcatz sticks, mods like the PS360 etc. I just can’t be sure.
I have been streaming through a half wired half wireless setup playing fighting games off my PC and it works really well. Even to play online.