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Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

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Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#231
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the explanation but it shattered the narrative by mind was building about an alien intelligence that slipped up and posted about its memories of its sixth physical form, the result of its fifth metamorphosis.

Op is a Pak Protector

Is that like a pocket protector or a trapper keeper?

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#232
post #108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " which were just those companies’s normal hardware design " For Alienware (not sure about the others, but AW was Valve's lead partner on it anyway) you're right in that it was a computer designed by Alienware not Valve, however it was a) very different to other Alienware PCs, and b) Valve were genuinely part of the development process, they didn't just say "hey make a small computer". They also shipped with the fi…

> first gen of Steam controllers, which were created by Valve themselves The best goddamn controllers ever made, too, I still have one in a box somewhere around here and I won't use it because it's so awesome I don't want it to break. Pretty dumb eh? The two touchpads were the absolute best, I've never had control like that in an FPS and to this day I can't play any FPS with a stick because I was ruined on the Steam…

Do the steam deck pads achieve the same thing?

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#233
post #202
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minisforum machines are excellent in that regard. Sturdy little bricks with price and performance.

I have one and my main gripe with it is how large the power brick is. It's practically like carrying a second mini pc; I didn't take this into account when I got it, lesson learned.

I've seen some newer models pop-up recently with inbuilt power supplies.

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.

Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.

Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.

anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.

edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay this all sounds great, what specs do I need on the machine connected to the TV? Will a Raspberry Pi 3 work? Pine64? Atomic Pi? (That's x86_64, intel Celeron) Anything more than that and the value proposition goes way down. For every 50 grams lighter I am willing to lose 1fps. For every fan removed I will drop an entire resolution (4k -> 2k -> FHD...) Change "lighter" to heavier if it makes sense. My comfort and…

It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key. I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go. My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-sp…

thanks, i have fiber and copper at the TVs. not in a pretty, or impressive way, i just have a switch next to the sets is all. fiber is impervious to most lightning strikes.

I got some hardware, someone else mentioned h264/265 hard requirements, but there were codecs before that for FHD that even a pi model B could handle (among them x264 i imagine). My main viewscreen is 720p60, DLP, it's real sensitive to artifacts in the visual output being literally glaring. doesn't take much horsepower to move 720p60 relative to fhd or 4k, imo; but here i am, hands out, begging for solutions!

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key. I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go. My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-sp…

Lossless scaling requires some horsepower though

the gaming machine can handle all that, as i currently use it with a steam link (mentioned elsewhere) which means it's scaled from 4k/2k to 1080p or 720p depending on what TV i'm on. I'm sure i can run 4k (with a dummy hdmi dongle as i don't have a 4k plugged in to this pc anymore) with moonlight/sunlight/etc because i can do it with remote desktop!

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use my steam link all the time. I have it fiber back hauled to the computer that it runs off of. I'm thinking of buying a couple more. Give one to my kid and one put on a projector so I don't have to keep moving it back and forth. Also, I think the device you're looking for is a deck because you can plug that into a television and use a wireless remote with it. The steam link is the best remote display device…

I have used an old sony bravia tv to cast COD from an android phone. Every time I connected, latency varied from 100 - 200 ms to 10 seconds. I had to reconnect several times until the latency was satisfactory. Conclusion: it has been technically possible to cast to a tv for some years.

yes, miracast/screencast whatever was a thing prior to the Steam Link being released in November of 2015 (9 years and some change ago). some of the current devices can actually do sub-100ms of input latency, but you can't be in the same room as the source device or you'll go crazy. The roku stand-alone have the worst network and input latency, they're unusable for anything other than presentations.

firestick was when i said network i meant both the network and the actual refresh of the screen. watching a movie is one thing, but pushing "Y" and your character jumping should be "as instant as practicable" and steam link is the only one that is that that i've used, so far.

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always seemed to be a very deliberate design choice by them to avoid you being able to use their consumer cards headless versus paying them a large amount on the Quadro or DG cards, since the big problem we saw at $OLDJOB was always that you couldn't use CUDA on them headless. At said $OLDJOB, we ended up soldering dummy VGA plugs that had resistors across the right pins when we wanted to experiment with buildin…

Would bet that this is exactly why. I run Tesla GPUs in my server rack which don't even have display ports, but they run any OS just fine with the vGPU drivers, which Nvidia make an absolute pain to obtain.

The _very_ first gen of Tesla cards did have those headers on them, IIRC, and then successive ones had the headers on the board but not connected for another generation or so, IIRC.

You also used to be able to edit the PCI IDs for the drivers to get the Tesla ones to attach to consumer GPUs, but that stopped working at some point.

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.

Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily ; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve... I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtu…

Thank you for these details.

When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.

https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.

Re: Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cool. But now I want a power bank with hot swappable batteries/modules. Or better yet a connector that you can attach multiple power banks to and it gives power if at least one non-empty powerbank is connected.

Can you already do this just by daisy chaining them?

I'll elaborate. You'd think that by putting N powerbanks daisy chained together (except i imagine at either end) you get ~N times the mAh or runtime but i think you get probably .25N or less. the "last" powerbank in the chain, the one you'd charge to charge them all, would run out of power first, and about 15% of seconds more afterward, the second one, then the next, with the "first" powerbank, the one you're using for its USB ports to power a load lasting about 2x as long, no matter how many powerbanks you put in a row.

this is a supposition, but i don't think the numbers are very far off. Most powerbanks are 18650 or 26650 inside - flatter or "better" ones are lifepo or lipoly or whatever, instead of cylindrical Li-Ion. anyhow those are 4.2V nominal and USB wants 5V so all single cell or parallel'd 18650/26650 power banks are going to use a boost converter to get the voltage to 5.1V nominal at the USB terminal (assuming a dumb power bank, a power bank with power delivery will boost that even higher but also probably has multiple batteries in series, but that doesn't matter, it makes efficiency worse for our daisy chain regardless!). So these boost circuits "charge" something and store it until there's the correct number of electrons to equal whatever charge/joules is required to run the load. There is >15% wasted as heat either in the capacitor or the inductor (depending on the style of boost converter). There's another ~15% or so lost in the charging circuit, as it has to take 5.0VDC in and run a charging circuit (similar to mppt) on the battery at different voltages and/or amperages which again waste is generated as heat. Cable losses in the daisy chain probably account for a percent or two each, the indicator lights across all the power banks, plus all the microprocessors/etc inside of them probably waste another couple percent.

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