Steam Link is a small $50 device that streams PC Games played from Steam PC or Steam Machine to your TV up to 1080p resolution through your home network, and Valve has recently released an SDK to allow developers creating their own apps.
But before getting into the SDK features, let’s check out the hardware. The company (Valve) did not provide many details, but some users torn it down, so the hardware specs are not a secret anymore.
- SoC – Marvell DE3005-A1 ARMv7 processor @ 1.0 GHz with OpenGL ES2.0 capable GPU
- System Memory – 512MB RAM (Micron MT41K256M16LY-107)
- Storage – 4GB NAND flash (Micron MT29F32G08CBAC)
- Video Output – HDMI up to 1080p60
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 LE via Marvell 88W8897 wireless chip
- USB – 3x USB 2.0 host ports
- Power Supply – 5V via power barrel
- Dimensions – N/A
Marvell DE3005-A1 is also known as Marvell ARMADA 1500 mini used in the first ChromeCast.
Steam Link SDK is available on github, and includes support for OpenGL ES 2.0, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2.0, some samples, Linux kernel 3.18 source code, a rootfs, a GCC toolchain, and some scripts. There’s about 256MB RAM and 500 MB storage available for custom applications. So it’s some ways Steam Link is an ARM Linux board with limited resources, a little bit like a Raspberry Pi 1 board.
One developer (Slouken) has already ported Kodi to the device with the code available on Github. It is said to be running, but rather slowly, and with software decode through ffmpeg only, and it’s not clear whether hardware video decoding APIs are available for the platform.
Thanks to Harley for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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MAME4ALL (MAME for all) have also ported by Sam Lantinga to the Steam Link as a native app using the SDK. Sam Lantinga (a.k.a. slouken of SDL fame) has begun a native app MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) project for the Steam Link using the newly released SDK for it. http://github.com/ValveSoftware/steamlink-sdk/tree/master/examples/mame4all “This is a MAME Steam Link port based on the Squid Raspberry Pi port based on Franxis MAME4ALL which is itself based on the MAME 0.37b5 emulator by Nicola Salmoria. It emulates all arcade games supported by original MAME 0.37b5 plus some additional games from newer MAME versions. This… Read more »