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You can truly never anticipate how one might use their tech. After a Steam Frame owner asked why the VR headset didn’t work with their detachable disc drive, Valve developer gaberow said they were looking into it—and patched in kernel support mere minutes later.
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, AiodensGhost asked for the feature on October 18, gaberowe responded on October 19, then made the commit to the Steam Frame kernel in less than ten minutes.
If you’re wondering why someone would want CD-ROM support, AiodensGhost says, “I wanted to use my Steam Frame to be able to watch a movie on the road, and thought it was no big deal to use the detachable disc drive I had on my computer.”
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They continue, “Turns out that the Frame cannot power the player and even if it could it lacks the drivers to read a disc. Valve, this not only killed my ability to watch a movie, IT KILLED MY ABILITY TO INSTALL MY ABANDONWARE FROM 2006. You don’t sell NFS Carbon anymore.”
The mention of Need for Speed Carbon is interesting here, as it suggests one might opt to boot up a game on the Steam Frame from a CD-ROM drive, rather than streaming one from a library. Carbon is not officially on Steam (or any legal digital storefronts as far as I can see), so the only way to legally play some games on the Steam Frame would be via an old disc.
The Steam Frame does seem primarily built for use in VR games, but given its comfort and screen, it would make sense why one might enjoy it for 2D games and movies. CD-ROM support would make the device a little more versatile.
One thing that is worth noting here is that kernel-level support doesn’t mean that all Steam Frame units will officially gain the feature. It means Valve could implement the change in a future Steam Frame update should it want to. Given the public reply from a developer and the kernel change, my money is on official support arriving in the future, but Valve could always opt not to do so.
Should you want to add it yourself, you can install the kernel on your device via the ‘Deckard Linux no oopsies’ repo, instead of waiting for any sort of official update. But I’d hazard a guess that those looking for disc drive support are fairly few in the first place.
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