I know that this might not appeal to some of you hardcore FOSS types. But I’m curious if anyone has been able to get Steam running on the Reform?
This is the last hurdle for making the Reform a true daily replacement. I’m not looking for massive performance either, I just need it to run.
Any thoughts, help, words of encouragement? Thanks!
But all games on steam are x86, you need to run emulation, on not that powerful cpu wihout paravirtualisation support. Not sure if any title from there will be able to fly under such conditions. You may try qemu as a start and run some bare archlinux/manjaro in it.
So the imx8 can do virtualization? I mean it has enough umpf to virtualize a x86 VM and then game on it?
Just a suggestion: I would start not from the steam client and your entire steam library but with specific titles that you would enjoy playing. Your best bet are games which are open source and/or available for Linux arm64 devices. I found this list of games that should run, maybe some of those are of interest?
Otherwise, emulation offers many additional titles. If you look into older console or computer platforms, you will find plenty of playable titles. For more modern x64 games, there is for example box86. I have not used it myself, but it will likely require some work setting up and tuning and might not work with every game you throw at it – and, of course, the reform’s CPU will be a limiting factor.
Personally, I hope to get BrogueCE to work soon 
edit well that was easy: Brogue compiles directly according to the BUILD.md instructions and works like a charm
Well, any modern cpu can, not any can do it efficiently (eg with hw acceleration or paravirtualisation).
That is what I doubt.
Lucas had tweeted about box86 on the reform a few times back in November. Here’s the game specific ones:
Yeah I got box86 and box64 working, but I would have thought, that this would get Steam working as well. Folks have steam working on Rasp Pi systems, so I genuinely believe it is possible here.
This comment in the README reads like it is not currently working, but I would suggest you to ask people involved in the box86/64 projects or check if someone in the RPi community has managed to do it: GitHub - ptitSeb/box64: Box64 - Linux Userspace x86_64 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM64 Linux devices
Edit: This reads like 32-bit Steam is somewhat possible GitHub - ptitSeb/box86: Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices
Yes, I installed box86 & box64 via published package repos.
For box64 I installed the box64-generic-arm package.
Then ran the install_steam.sh script and then installed some missing dependencies after.
apt install libsm-dev:armhf libgl1:armhf libxinerama1:armhf libxdamage1:armhf
As already tested, Thimbleweed Park works just fine. Was hoping to run Return to Monkey Island but it wont display graphics yet (launches and audio plays to a blank screen if you install the mesa-vulkan-drivers package).
I’m out of disk space on my SD card, otherwise I’d try Portal 
If steam still doesn’t work for you, run /usr/local/bin/steam with BOX86_LOG=1 and install anything it complains about being the wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64, meaning it’s found the 64bit version of libraries installed, you need to install the armhf builds (ignore the libpng12.so.0 one, you’re not going to satisfy it)
You will need a swap device configured with the 4GB RAM CPU module as it’ll leave very little RAM free (less than a 100MB) and swap out more than 3.5GB.
After the install, you’ll want to pin the reform-debian-repo to arch=64 to suppress apt complaining there are no armhf packages found there (it’s non-fatal, just cosmetic) from then on.
Your /etc/apt/sources.list entry should look like this
deb [arch=arm64 trusted=yes] https://mntre.com/reform-debian-repo reform main
I wasn’t able to get the steam ui working on my pocket in box64, but I was able to get steamcmd [1] to run just fine and install and run steam games that seems to work more or less as much as expected.
The main downside to steamcmd is you have to type in your steam guard code by hand and installing programs requires you to pull the appid value for the given game or whatever you install from steamdb [2] or similar.
Great solution! Thanks! I will be trying this when I get home. Using Steam is nice because on Linux it does all the heavy lifting in setting up wine / proton and getting things going.
Was getting it working with box64 as simple as typing “box64 steamcmd”?
I just ran the shell script directly from the valve wiki, I think box64 handled the execution iirc.
Otherwise I did nothing special.
