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MagyarCheckMag | Forget the PlayStation Portal, here’s how to make a headless gaming PC and set up your own cloud gaming service
Cloud gaming services are getting more and more popular, but if you already have a gaming PC, why pay for something you already own. Steam Streaming has been available outside of your home network for a while, but the real benefit from streaming games with your PC comes from inside the house. You can stream to your 4K TV in the living room, or if your TV is predisposed, why not stream to your laptop or a handheld such as the Steam Deck while you get comfortable in bed. Having this option for many is far superior to being tied to a desk and chair.
There are multiple options for streaming in home, including Steam’s native Remote Play feature, however other options include Sunshine, Geforce Game Streaming and Parsec. While there are subtle differences between all of these platforms, they all more or less do the same thing; let you stream games to other devices.
Probably the easiest to get started with is Steam Remote Play. You can even add games that were not purchased from Steam to your library and stream them. The only real requirements are to have a solid wifi 5 (802.11ac) network. Connecting your gaming PC to your router via ethernet is essential, but from there a decent wifi 5 or 6 connection will let you stream games to whatever device you want to use. Just keep in mind that streaming at 4K will require a very solid wireless connection.
The first thing to do is to set up Remote Desktop so you can access your machine like you were sitting in front of it. Setting up a static IP address helps with this, but isn’t strictly necessary. However, if you want to start up a game you’ll need a disconnect script on your desktop. This will disconnect your Remote Desktop session without locking the screen and enable you to stream games.
Paste the following command into Notepad and save it on the desktop as a .bat file.
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "$sessionid=((quser $env:USERNAME | select -Skip 1) -split '\s+')[2]; tscon $sessionid /dest:console" 2> UnlockErrors.log
Make sure you run it as admin when you want to disconnect before launching a game remotely.
While it isn’t strictly necessary to go completely headless, leaving your monitor on showing games while playing remotely might not be desirable. However Windows will not let you play games without some sort of monitor connected and turned on. Therefore to go completely headless you will need a HDMI dummy plug (available from amazon for only $7.99). This will spoof windows into thinking that a 4K monitor is attached.
If you fire up Steam (PC’s and Steam Deck) or Steam Remote Play (Android and iOS) you can pair your devices (Remote Desktop comes in handy for this - just don’t forget to use your disconnect script) and all your installed games on your gaming PC should show up. You'll have a green button with the option to stream and off you go. Steam link supports a range of controllers including PS4, PS5 and Xbox. You can even stream to your phone or a work computer while you are away from home, though this is very heavily dependent on your upstream connection from your house, as well as your external download speed and ping.
While this is a very basic guide to getting started, there are many options for running a headless gaming PC. Multi threaded CPU’s and virtualisation software such as Proxmox, Unraid and Truenas lend themselves very well to creating home servers. With an 8 core / 16 thread CPU you might choose to assign 5 physical cores to a virtualised gaming machine with your GPU passed through to it, 2 cores to a Linux VM, and the rest to running some dockers and NAS shares. These days gaming PC’s are massively overpowered, so why not put some of that extra horsepower to use and make your gaming PC work for you.
