Developer Loads Steam On a $100 ARM Single Board Computer

"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and Armbian." The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the Box86 and Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]...
The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now.)

"At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform." At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM.

Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"...
"You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."

inexpensive

[djgl]

If $100 is inexpensive, which ones are the expensive ARM SBCs?

Re:

[OrangeTide]

NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano is $250, so $100 isn't really near the top of the market.
And some people have been messing with plugging discrete graphics cards into PCIe slots on ARM systems, and that gets expensive fast.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

I have $1000 SBCs.
$100 is pretty cheap.
It's an Orange Pi 5 Plus. This isn't a raspberry Pi. It's got 2 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 3 HDMI ports, m.2, and eMMC.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

You can get ARM SBCs in various price configurations. Sub-$100 is a new category that was only created by the Raspberry Pi boards when they came out - which has created a bunch of competitors.

But an ARM EVB for $500 was considered low price, with $1000 being more of a low end system. High end ARM SBCs could be had for around $5000 or so, and $10,000 isn't unusual in the realm.

Something using the latest Qualcomm SoCs could be had for $5000 or so, if you want an automotive kit it would be $10,000.

One of my fo

Re:

[djgl]

But these were not expensive because of expensive parts. These were expensive because of the tiny production runs.

Re:inexpensive

[sodul]

I got a R36 style handheld for my son that can run most 8 bits and 16 bits games, some higher spec ones, for $30, including taxes and shipping.

Specs are:
- RK3326, 4x ARM Cortex-A35 @ 1.5 GHz CPU and ARM Mali-G31 MP2 GPU
- 1GB RAM
- 3.5" 640x480 IPS display, actually quite nice.
- 64GB SD card (which I replaced with a brand one)
- 3500mAh 3.7V battery. Nokia style which is relatively easy to replace. The battery lasts several hours.
- USB-C port, it can get WiFi+BT with a dongle.

I also got a bigger unit for about $66, shipped, which has a 5.5" screen, faster CPU/GPU (RK3566), 2GB RAM, WiFi, BlueTooth, HDMI out, 2SD card slots.

These run linux and they are relatively easy to upgrade to a different OS.

Re:

[luvirini]

Did you use the base installed Linux or changed?

And if you changed, what instructions did you follow?

Re:

[sodul]

I changed it on both.

For the cheaper one I found a fresher version back in December, overall similar to these instructions: https://ko-fi.com/post/Install... [ko-fi.com]
It looks like there are even newer images actively maintained: https://github.com/AeolusUX/Ar... [github.com]

For the larger unit, it has 2 SD cards slots: one for the OS, one for the custom data, which make it easier to refresh, but there is a distribution that offers live upgrades:
https://rocknix.org/play/insta... [rocknix.org]

Overall the process is:
- find a compatible disk imag

Re: inexpensive

[beelsebob]

Itâ(TM)sa machine powerful enough that if you said you had doom running on it, Iâ(TM)d wonder why you bothered. Itâ(TM)s a couple of orders of magnitude faster (at least) than the machines that originally ran it. How on earth have we got to a point where such a machine takes 5 minutes to load a simple game library?

But can it run Crysis?

[SgtKellogg]

Jokes aside this is pretty cool, there are tons of ARM based handhelds on the market that this would be a huge boon for

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

This is something you've always been able to do arm SBCs that ran linux... It's always been terrible... still is.
He came across guides that were out of date, which wouldn't surprise me- the following trying to maintain the functionality of full virtualization on an arm SBC is microscopic due to how bad it is.

Re:

[ChunderDownunder]

Clearly I'm missing the bigger picture about the lack of an ARM64-native Steam client for the emergence of Windows 11 on ARM gaming titles. Isn't that what Qualcomm and MS have been partnering on for the past decade?

Anyhow, emulating an x86 gaming PC on an ARM box with weaker cores than a mid-range Android phone seems like an exercise in pain.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Clearly I'm missing the bigger picture about the lack of an ARM64-native Steam client for the emergence of Windows 11 on ARM gaming titles. Isn't that what Qualcomm and MS have been partnering on for the past decade?

Ya, dunno. On the Mac side, we're certainly seeing lots of native arm games.
I'm not sure why the Windows side is lagging.. except maybe because there still exist x86-64 platforms available, while on Macs, they're gone, and they're not coming back.

Anyhow, emulating an x86 gaming PC on an ARM box with weaker cores than a mid-range Android phone seems like an exercise in pain.

Ya, it is. But mostly the problem right now is the open-source solutions simply don't perform well enough.
Box86/64's DynaRec is about 50% as quick as Rosetta2 on the same hardware.
I'd guess that some amount of this has to do with Prism and Rosetta2 being tightly

Re:

[sodul]

I use a MBP at work and the ONLY app that I need to use that is Intel only is the AWS VPN. AWS is pushing its customers to use their ARM platform, but they can't recompile their app to target ARM CPUs. Their client is based off open source code which does have ARM releases.

Overall, I'm quite impressed at how good the ARM laptops are compared to the Intel ones. They also benefit from Jony Ive being gone and no longer pushing form over function. The engineers were able to design a proper work machine. Sure th

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Sucks that Qualcomm didn't implement TSO in its chip design

I agree. It's basically essential for any serious attempt at transitioning away from x86.

seems like just another aspect of their product being half-assed.

Or... they didn't build the chip to facilitate the transition from x86.
TSO is not trivial. The entire arm core exists without strict memory ordering. Adding it requires a lot of work (and silicon)

Confused?

[zendarva]

Uh... My kid's got an rpi4 with 4 gigs ram perched on the back of his tv running steam link right now. Works fine? Those are under 100$ aren't they?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam Link doesn't run the game on the device.

Re:

[zendarva]

Or people who can read. "Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness." I responded with a practical way to play your steam games. You're more than welcome to take your passive aggressive shitbird self elsewhere.

Seriously?

[SuiteSisterMary]

How is 'I installed a computer program on a computer' noteworthy?

Re:

[AvitarX]

Probably why the story is about someone installing a string of programs as a proof of concept that you can get some tolerable gameplay on a $100 computer with a different architecture than the games were made for.

It also summarizes that it's likely not worth doing, and gives you an easy way to do it yourself.

Re:

[sabbede]

Seems pretty neat to me. Getting software to run on things it wasn't supposed to is cool.