If you’ve been keeping up in the Retro Handheld scene, you’d know that a bunch of people are trying in one way or another to port SteamOS to their Arm handhelds. Whether that’s Steam through Rocknix or Armada as a dedicated OS, everyone wants a go at it. Well it seems like Valve is really aiming to help with their latest SteamOS Beta 3.8.25. Among other updates, the biggest one worth looking at is the Non-Valve Devices category, which sees initial support for a number of devices as listed below.
Non-Valve Devices
- Improve support for MSI Claw and OneXPlayer device variants
- Improve support for devices with external or no Wi-Fi adapters
- Fixed an infrequent bug where some 3rd party handhelds would have input ignored when held
- Added initial gamepad support for MSI Claw 8 EX AI+
- Added initial gamepad support for Konkr FIT
- Added initial gamepad support for AYANEO Pocket S2
- Updated gamepad support for OneXPlayer Apex with new firmware
Alongside oddities like the Konkr FIT, the Ayaneo Pocket S2 is a big deal as that’s native support for an Android device directly. Everyone already knows that the Steam Frame is running SteamOS on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but it looks like they’re really aiming to help their support by testing the waters with the S2 and its G3 Gen 3. We certainly are looking forwards to what’s going to be next.
As for the rest of the updates, you can take a look in Valve’s changelog directly, but there are a few good updates in this beta, including continued support for the original Steam Controller. You can find the rest of the updates in SteamOS 3.8.25 below.
General
- Added support for waking up from the Steam Controller Wireless Adapter (2015)
- Improved battery indications when the device is charging in but using more power than the charger can provide
- Preliminary support for the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter
- Added support for Steam Controller (2026) to the built-inÂ
hid_steam controller driver, enabling use with native controller applications when Steam is not running - Fixed an issue where hotplugging HDMI displays could cause lockups in Desktop Mode
- Fixed an issue where TVs supporting an HDMI “Game Mode” would display the initial boot logo before engaging said mode, causing unnecessary delay and flashing
- Fixed some cases of slow or stuck Wi-Fi connections with certain adapters
- Fixed an issue causing previous SteamOS updates to fail to apply for some users
Steam Machine Firmware 108
- Fixed an issue where the system could occasionally wake up immediately after going to sleep
- Fixed a rare issue where CPU performance could be degraded until reboot after waking up from sleep
Audio
- Fix for HDMI audio dropouts with some game and TV combinations
- Improve reliability of HDMI hotplug detection
- Add option to prefer lower latency audio codecs for Bluetooth devices
Developer
- Updated the Linux kernel to 6.18.42
Again, it’s awesome to see all of the work Valve is continuing to put in especially towards new devices that aren’t their own. We just hope that this just pushes the “Steam on Arm” argument even further than it already is.
