Valve releases Steam Link SDK to develop Apps

Valve releases Steam Link SDK to develop Apps

 

Valve has released a Steam Link SDK to allowing gamers and developers to develop applications that run naively on the device. The full specification for the Steam Link have also been revealed, showing that the Steam link has 500MB of internal storage. 

This will allow the Steam link to do more for it’s users, perhaps allowing the link to give Smart TV like functionality. Hopefully this means that we will be seeing a YouTube App, a Netflix App and perhaps even an Internet browser. 

 

    

The Steam Link hardware is a single core ARMv7 processor using the hard-float ABI,
running at 1 GHz, with neon instruction support. It has approximately 256 MB of available
RAM and 500 MB of usable flash storage.

The Steam Link software is custom Linux firmware based on kernel 3.8 and glibc 2.19.

The Steam Link SDK has support for the following major APIs:

• OpenGL ES 2.0
• Qt 5.4
• SDL 2.0

The SDL game controller API is recommended for Steam Controller support on the Steam Link.

• examples – very simple example applications to demonstrate how to build applications using the SDK
• external – source code to 3rd party components of the Steam Link, each directory has a “build_soc.sh” script to rebuild the component.
• kernel -Steam Link linux kernel source code
• rootfs – Steam Link root filesystem
• toolchain – GCC toolchain for Steam Link
• setenv.sh – Script to configure build environment

 

This SDK adds a while new dimension to the Steam Link, allowing it to become something that is much more than just a mere game streaming device. Hopefully we will see some good apps released for the Steam Link soon.   

 

Join the discussion on the Steam Link developer SDK on the OC3D Forums.