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Limelight Turns Your Raspberry Pi or Android Device Into a Steam Machine

A new app/program available for allows you to stream your Steam game collection from your desktop to an Android device/Raspberry Pi.
This article is over 10 years old and may contain outdated information

Just a few days ago on the Raspberry Pi forums, user irtimmer created his own makeshift Steam Box using his Raspberry Pi. The program is called Limelight, and can be run on an Android device or Raspberry Pi.

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So what exactly is Limelight, and what does it do?

Great question! Basically, Limelight is an open source implementation on NVIDIA’s GameStream, as used by the NVIDIA Shield, but built for Linux/OSX/Windows. Limelight allows you to stream your full Steam game collection from your desktop/laptop straight to your Raspberry Pi or Android device. The video below demonstrates a user who streamed the hit game Skyrim from his desktop to his Sony Xperia Z smartphone using the Limelight app.

Want to try this our for yourself? Here’s what you need to get started:

  • GFE compatible computer with GTX 600/700 series GPU (for the PC you’re streaming from)
  • High-end wireless router (802.11n dual-band recommended) or Wired network

If you have those two items and still want to try it out, here’s the instructions for getting everything up and running:

  • Ensure your machine and Raspberry Pi are on the same network
  • Turn on Shield Streaming in the GFE settings
  • Start Limelight-pi with -pair option
  • Accept the pairing confirmation on your PC
  • Start Limelight-pi normally
  • Play games!

You can download Limelight for your Pi here. 

Here’s the Android version of Limelight.

Don’t worry, both are completely free and you can use them whenever you like.

Are you going to download Limelight and give it a try? Drop a comment below on what you think!


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