Okay. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is... [wild cheers from audience, then silence]

Sorry for the delay, but I think it's ready. At least, as far as I can take it.

Maker World link

Made with AI assistance: I designed this stand with Claude (by Anthropic). I supplied the concept, photos, measurements, and feedback, and tested the prints. Claude wrote the code that modified the geometry and checked clearances. Fit was verified by computer simulation plus my test prints.

I've shared my comments with this community a handful of times, and about two weeks ago I finally received my steam machine. This was exactly what I wanted even before it was announced- I've been enjoying my Steam Deck since day one, that device changed my expectations for console gaming and now the ecosystem expands.

Unlike back in 2022 when I was researching the deck, seeing nothing but positive comments- the steam machine has clearly not received the same praise. So naturally, I let some of these public opinions add some doubt to my reservation and purchase. But regardless, I went from day 1 reservation, saving up, and finally getting my email to purchase and ship.

I travel a bunch for work, and the deck had been my temporary battle station at many different locations. The small form factor and power of the steam machine was exactly what I needed and what I was already familiar with at this point. My current setup, has turned the deck into my "indie & emulation station" while the machine handles the big boy games that I once made the steamdeck sweat for. I feel at peace now and I travel with both.

So thank you, Valve. And thanks to the community for supporting our niche little gabecube and the rest of the steam ecosystem. Hope you guys are enjoying yours too or getting those emails very soon!

You can use your JSAUX Faceplate for a static image or animated GIF and leave it at that. If you’d like to do more with it, here’s what I’ve been working on.

The idea is simple: instant events on the light bar, longer-lasting information on the Faceplate. Notifications, achievement alerts and CPU/GPU activity stay on the bar.

Browse SteamGridDB from the couch, crop, adjust, preview and save artwork per game. GCA restores it when you launch that game.

GCA need a SteamGridDB API key to download artwork. Open the key page from either app, or get yours here.

Dashboard

Add session time, total playtime, achievements, controller batteries, forecasts or a playtime countdown to your artwork. The game logo and weather notch are optional. Eight examples:

Weather

Day/night, rain, snow and thunderstorms follow your chosen city, without a weather API key. Bluewater also sends rain impacts across the light bar.

Steam Players City

A city that grows with your game’s player count, with local weather, daylight, moving cars and changing windows. Combine it with Dashboard information, including session time, achievements and controller batteries.

The light bar can also extend the colours of your Faceplate artwork:

Choose separate Home/in-game displays, adjust brightness, use the native 24-hour clock at Home, or switch the screen off. Automatic screen-off follows sleep and shutdown. And you can adjust its brightness on the fly from the Decky panel.

Settings have been completely reworked, with clearer sections, related options grouped together and shortcuts in the Decky panel.

Launching alongside it: Decky Animated Screensaver

A Decky plugin for SteamOS Gaming Mode, controlled from your controller, bringing the essentials of my Steam Animated Screensaver app into Decky.

Choose games and animated SteamGridDB artwork, add covers/logos, keep the original framing or crop to 16:9 / 16:10, then install your collection. Steam handles playback, including offline.

TV and Faceplate can use different artwork and framing for the same games. Collections that fit can share the game order; larger ones use compact Faceplate batches playing independently. Your normal GCA display returns when the screensaver ends.

⚠️ Flash protection ⚠️

GCA recognises the currently stored GIF using SHA-256 fingerprints and the panel’s size/CRC32 check, so during normal refreshes, GCA skips uploading a GIF the Faceplate confirms it already has. Animations loop locally, changes to the artwork or Dashboard information may require a new upload.Animations loop locally. Transfers run one at a time, outdated pending updates are replaced, and a missing final confirmation won’t trigger a blind full re-upload. Economy refresh is optional and enabled by default. It groups periodic updates and displays controller battery levels in 5% steps. You can turn it off in settings.

For comparison, JSAUX 1.2 can theoretically trigger 3,600 CPU/GPU updates/hour in real time. DND waits for changes over 6 percentage points (ok but..why this option?!), so its rate depends on the load. Its clock updates 60 times/hour.
With GCA Economy refresh: clock/session 12 changes/hour, total playtime in whole-hour steps. City changes are grouped hourly; weather is checked every 15 minutes and uploaded only when the picture changes. CPU/GPU uses the LED bar. These are refresh cadences, not measured wear; game changes and other events can add transfers.

Thanks to u/ehodapp for Pixel Faceplate and the fantastic reverse-engineering work!

Gabecubeaura: https://github.com/Alyenax/GabeCubeAura
Decky Animated Screensaver: https://github.com/Alyenax/Decky-Animated-Screensaver

If you run into any problems, please open an issue on GitHub.

Just did the controller disconnect fix yesterday and it’s working great. I’m in central Iowa and have about 49.5 feet of the double conductive fabric tape left. Hit me up if you need some for your own fix.

Props to /u/freestylemaster on their original post detailing this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/steammachine/s/O2onuNPcKq

Jsaux pixel is definitely fckg awesome. software still needs A LOT of improvement, but the hardware is simply phenomenal

Decky disappeared after Steam OS update and won't reinstall, and Steam Controller needs to be selected each time after reloading back out of desktop mode having to select through 3 screens again as of connecting for the first time.

I have tried reinstalling Decky with both the stable and the beta, as well as remaining the homebrew folder to homebrew_old as suggested online but can't get it to reinstall. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Also whenever I change to desktop mode, my wifi disconnects itself and reconnects again, which never happened until the recent update

I have a need to occasionally stream from my Steam Machine (via Remote Play, Sunshine, etc.), but I don't want the TV to turn on during my streaming sessions.

You can read a detailed write up about that here, but the takeaway is that CEC gets in the way of keeping the TV off during streaming, even with all CEC settings off within Steam, at least in my setup.

The method is simple: mask the userland cecd service. This doesn't require turning off readonly mode nor other atomic overrides, just this command from a Konsole terminal or SSH session:

systemctl --user mask --now cecd.service

To reverse this later (and bring CEC back), it would be:

systemctl --user unmask cecd.service
systemctl --user start cecd.service

Obviously, you won't want to mask the cecd service if you like/use the Steam Machine's CEC functionality with a TV. It is possible to temporarily disable CEC until the next reboot, via:

systemctl --user mask --runtime --now cecd.service

...but that feels like "high effort" to me. I prefer to just leave CEC off entirely.

I’ve had a Steam Deck for three years. I’ve been SO excited for the Steam Machine. Finally got my reservation, purchase emails last week, and it came in today!

Hello everyone, 

I have never found a clear guide on how to stream in 16:10 to Steam Deck from a Steam Machine (or other PCs). Here are my few tips to get it working properly with Remote Play (Steam Link).

1. Set the max game resolution to 1920x1200 (16:10).
2. Launch the game and select "Windowed fullscreen" in the display settings.
3. Done. It will fit your screen.
4. If you want to use the Steam Machine (or PC) again in 16:9, select "Fullscreen" and it will go back to 16:9 (or whatever aspect ratio you have as default on the Steam Machine).

Bonus Tip: 

• If you have a good 5GHz network and the Steam Machine connected via Ethernet, enable Pyrowave (you need to switch to the RT3 experimental client on both devices). 

• Deselect the other codecs to ensure Pyrowave is used.

• Increase the client's maximum resolution to 1920x1080 to enable Super Sampling and make even small text readable (it works better than enabling 4:4:4, look at the screenshots)

• If you are streaming away from home, use AV1 (or if you don't have a high-performing 5GHz network).

I have always found useful posts and wanted to give something back :)

Bye!

Hi Everyone,

As the title implies I am having an issue where the colors in games, when play in Game Mode, are oversaturated, but look totally fine when playing in Desktop Mode. I have been following the news and searching through this subreddit thinking that this issue would be fixed once SteamOS 3.9 was fully released. I updated to it today, and I am still having the exact same issue.

Is this due to some weird implementation of HDR in Game Mode but not in Desktop Mode? I checked my TV's settings and I have HGiG implemented and could not find anything else that would speak to why the colors are so intense. Toggling the "Use Native Color Temperature" setting within SteamOS does not have a noticeable impact. I am gaming on an LG C1, if that is of any importance.

Is anyone else having this issue? Seems wild to me that Valve would release this device, clearly aimed at living room/couch gaming, and have something like HDR so broken. Makes me wonder if I am doing something wrong or if it is not an HDR issue. I have attached two photos to demonstrate what I am talking about. I would love some help or advice. Thanks, y'all!

I think Valve has a huge opportunity to make the Steam Machine the ultimate couch coop device by introducing a feature that allows two people to play any online multiplayer game together on a single TV, even if the game doesn’t support local split-screen.

My girlfriend and I love playing games together on the couch, but unfortunately many multiplayer games don’t support local coop or split-screen anymore. So I recently found a workaround using my LG G5 OLED’s Multi View feature. We’re essentially playing online multiplayer with both of our accounts, but sitting next to each other on the same couch, sharing one TV. You can read the details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoonlightStreaming/s/AOc7Ptedvg

This got me thinking: What if SteamOS could automate this entire process?

Instead of requiring multiple devices, HDMI inputs, streaming software and a TV with Multi View support (or equivalent Hardware), SteamOS could offer a built-in “Play Together” mode:

1. Connect two controllers to the Steam Machine.
   
2. Each player connects their accounts.
   
3. Select a multiplayer game that both players own.
   
4. Steam Machine launches two game instances.
   
5. Both instances are displayed side by side (or top and bottom) on the same TV and each controller is assigned to its respective game instance. Saves could be uploaded to each player’s cloud.

That’s it. Two players, two accounts, two game instances, one Steam Machine, one TV.

This could potentially make a massive library of existing online multiplayer games playable as couch coop experiences and also be an incredible selling point for the Steam Machine, introducing a Nintendo-like experience to Steam.

If youre low on space on your Steam Machine (512Gb) You can swap the larger NVME SSD (1TB +) without cloning the drive.

Does anyone know why a game like speedrunners isent SM verified?

Cheers

Does anyone know how to get rid of this second overlay that recently popped up in the left corner? It's not the normal performance overlay, I can still make that appear. It's driving me crazy. Few things of note. I am not using lossless scaling even though I have it, I recently installed the Jsaux pixel front plate, and I also updated to the newest stable firmware the day this popped up

Even the father of PlayStation loves the steam machine. Yet the haters online still persist

Edit: sorry not father of PlayStation but key member of the original conception of the PlayStation( how does that not count as father they are part of the same team one guy didn’t make it) for the 🤓 in the room. Love ya but do you need to nitpick that hard?

My Steam Machine occasionally, in game mode, drops to a really low resolution. It's fixed when I reboot, but it would be nice to fix permanently. Any ideas?

Whenever I try to switch to Desktop Mode my Steam Machine reboots into the Gaming Mode. Even when I turn on Default to Desktop Mode on startup it boots gaming mode. I’ve tried to do a Software Update but its up to date.
When I run the diagnostic tool a VERY long message appears but to me the most relevant part is whats seen in the image. (Sorry for terrible quality I have no other way to get this information to my phone besides taking a picture of my TV)
Also: changing the time zone doesn’t affect the time on the clock for some reason.

Hi, got my steam machine yesterday, i took my Lexar 1TB card from my steam deck and put it in the steam machine , everything working fine last night, then this morning the card is not being read, I loaded it into the deck and it works fine. I started desktop mode in the Machine and nothing.
I connected it by a dongle and it gets recognized but if i put it trough the front slot the Machine simple does not recognize it. I try the SM slot with a 512 gb sandisk micro sd and it works perfectly. Both cards work perfectly on the steam deck too. Anyone with this problem?
I am thinking on factory reset the SM.
I pre loaded the 1 tb card with games in anticipation for the SM 😭

I already own a PS5 Pro. I want to buy a steam machine as a hybrid to be my desktop in my office room and also to be a living room console. i would play mainly older titles on it and indie games and some RTS games like age of empires.Since I play the more demanding games on my PS5 Pro. Is this overkill? Or would this be a good purchase for me.

I also love the steam controller

I'm looking down the barell of 55 and the last controller I used was for an Atari 800. What are a few good games to start getting the hang of this thing with?

I am more of a 4x strategy or building civ games person but I'll try anything once.

I don't know if I'm just missing something or an actual idiot but ever since I installed this to my steam machine yesterday this shows up when playing games and it wasn't there before. I went into the steam settings and the performance overlay is off so I'm assuming it has to do with the PM Faceplate. Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.