{"id":132,"date":"2019-07-31T20:23:19","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T00:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/raucousatthecaucus.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2019-07-31T20:23:19","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T00:23:19","slug":"game-streaming-from-home-to-anywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/2019\/07\/31\/game-streaming-from-home-to-anywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Streaming From Home to Anywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In late 2017, I was diagnosed with Crohn&#8217;s Disease. After trying a few oral medications, I&#8217;m moving on to a biologic infusion. That means, at least for the first several treatments, I&#8217;ll be hanging out in a chair with an IV in my arm for a couple hours. I&#8217;ll need something to entertain myself. I find that I quickly exhaust my usual website reading rotation if I&#8217;m faced with a lengthy wait, and I&#8217;m not really a book reader. So I thought a portable game console, such as a Nintendo Switch, might be a decent buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To be honest, I&#8217;ve been trying to justify a Switch since I&#8217;ve been watching Super Mario Maker 2 on Twitch for the last month or so. This seemed like a great way to justify that purchase. Additionally, someone got Android working on the Switch a few days ago, expanding the the gaming possibilities to include streaming PC games. I knew Valve had a Steam Link app for Android and I figured it couldn&#8217;t be too hard to make game streaming work over the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I dug into the Switch idea a bit more. In order to hack a Switch, its firmware has to be older than a certain version. That means I can&#8217;t buy a new one to hack, and would have to search for a used one with a serial number in the right range. I found several eBay listings for hackable Switches, but the prices turned me off a bit. Most were asking about $160 for just the console, with no Joy-Cons, no AC adapter and no dock. After adding $50-$80 for new controllers and $15 for an AC adapter, it didn&#8217;t seem like such a great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I did get a Switch, I&#8217;d definitely want Super Mario Maker 2, which could be a problem with a hacked console. Nintendo has some means of detecting a console that has been tampered with, and can ban that console from accessing any features that require internet access. If the console was cheap enough, I could deal with that, but not for $250 or so. Then I realized that I didn&#8217;t even need a Switch. I could just use an Android tablet, and I already have one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Almost immediately after that, I figured that I could probably just use my nice Windows laptop (a base model Surface Book 1). And it turns out I can. I tried to get Steam Link Anywhere going, but couldn&#8217;t figure it out. Which was probably a blessing in disguise. I decided to try <a href=\"https:\/\/moonlight-stream.org\/\">Moonlight<\/a>, which I was originally going to use on the Switch, and then the Android tablet. Turns out the people behind the project have developed a client package for just about anything with a network connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To use Moonlight, I first installed Nvidia GeForce Experience. Moonlight works by making your client look like an Nvidia Shield to Geforce Experience. Initially I was skeptical about this solution because I wasn&#8217;t sure it would work with UWP games, like Forza Horizon 4 or Sea of Thieves. I was wrong. GeForce Experience auto-detected the UWP games right away. I installed Moonlight on my laptop and gave it a try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was stunned at how well it worked. I launched Sea of Thieves, and after a bit of loading I was in the game, with it working as if I was sitting at my desktop. I bumped the resolution from the default 720p to 1080p, and it was just about perfect. The laptop&#8217;s trackpad wasn&#8217;t terribly responsive, but I plan on using a PS4 controller instead. I installed the Moonlight internet access utility on the desktop and tried it using my phone&#8217;s wi-fi hotspot. I didn&#8217;t want to use up all my data, so I only tried it for a tiny while, but it seemed to be just as good as the local network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m really pleased with the results. It was so much easier to set up than I expected and the gaming experience was better than I hoped for. Now I just need to set up my Raspberry Pi to use a wake on LAN command to start the desktop and I&#8217;ll be all set. I&#8217;m looking forward to trying this out from another building. I&#8217;m expecting more perfection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In late 2017, I was diagnosed with Crohn&#8217;s Disease. After trying a few oral medications, I&#8217;m moving on to a biologic infusion. That means, at least for the first several treatments, I&#8217;ll be hanging out in a chair with an IV in my arm for a couple hours. I&#8217;ll need something to entertain myself. I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/2019\/07\/31\/game-streaming-from-home-to-anywhere\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Game Streaming From Home to Anywhere&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raucousatthecaucus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}