Recap: Valve's trio of Steam Box announcements [Joystiq]

[DP ServBot]

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Valve took its time delivering three announcements this week, each related to the long-rumored Steam Box (http://www.joystiq.com/tag/steam-box/). Since March 2012, Valve has seesawed on the existence of a Steam-based piece of hardware, but one thing has remained constant: If the Steam Box existed, it would run on Linux. Here we present a rundown of the week's major news, and some thoughts on Valve's living room strategy.

On Monday, Valve unveiled SteamOS (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/23/steamos-streams-from-computer-to-a-big-screen-using-linux/), a Linux-based operating system designed to stream games, music, TV and movies from a PC and to a living room screen, with native Linux games.
On Wednesday, Steam Box was officially announced as Steam Machines (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/25/steam-box-exists/), a series of different boxes for varying player needs, all running SteamOS.
On Friday, Valve revealed its Steam Controller (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/27/valve-reveals-steam-machines-pc-game-controller/), a gamepad with trackpads in the place of analog sticks, attempting to bring keyboard-and-mouse gaming to the couch
Valve is sending out 300 Steam Machines and controllers (sans a few features (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/27/steam-machines-beta-program-controller-wont-have-touchscreen/)) to Steam users in a beta program (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/09/25/steam-machines-eligibility-quest-offers-beta-program-to-luck/).

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[JSoup]

I'm actually surprised that we don't have an active topic about this on Modern Gaming.
What interested me is the completely hackable and modable aspects. There are already talks of modding SteamOS to be usable for non-gaming purposes, as just a standard Windows replacement. Others are already saying they want to get started coding emulators for the SteamBox. I've been on about making the trackpad more usable to people like me who aren't keen on trackpads and such. My thought was modding the controller with, say, an N64 controller repair kit to make a trackpad joystick.

Lot of fun things on the horizon, although most of the Linux talk goes right over my head.

[Kitsune Sniper]

SteamOS is running a Linux variant. It could be Ubuntu.

This means that people can port existing emulators with little trouble. You don't have to make anything, you just recompile an existing source port targeting that specific Linux variant - it might not even be necessary. Since many emulators already have native Linux ports then it won't be that much trouble to add stuff to your new OS. Unless of course Valve puts locks on what packages people are allowed to install.

[JSoup]

From what little they've told us, all there of these things are meant to be completely moddable for your needs, all the way down to the core. Now, how that actually pans out will be seen in the coming months.