Here’s the new Steam controller displaying the “ground theme” super mario bros 2: :
From here is “still alive” portal – Fittings for valve hardware:
I even got it played Apocalypse: :
Are you wondering how the controller, which doesn’t have speakers, produces audio? Valve’s first Steam controller, even though discontinued, was a great gadget for tinkerers – someone even wrote an open-source program to “sing” it. Fast forward to now, less than a month after the launch of the second-generation Steam Controller, and some enterprising folks have even used that program to “sing” it.
“The way the controller makes noise is through the haptic motors in the trackpad,” says CrazyCritic89, the man behind “Still Alive” and super mario bros 2 The video tells The Verge. Those motors typically respond when your thumb slides over the trackpad, or let you “press” them like a button, even if they don’t actually click. But haptic motors can also vibrate “at specific frequencies, essentially like a speaker,” CrazyCritic explains. Valve uses it to make the controller play sounds, and if you want to make your controller sing a song, you can now do that too.
With CrazyCritic89’s “Steam Haptics Singer”, available on GitHub in Windows and Linux versions, you can play MIDI tracks on your Steam controller (any generation) or your Steam deck – simple digital music files that contain notes instead of actual recorded audio. To play some music from my personal Steam controller, I found some MIDI files online and followed CrazyCritic89’s instructions. It took a bit of tweaking – I actually had to spend some time with the terminal in desktop mode on my Steam Deck to get my Steam controller to work. But when I heard the first note from my controller, I was smiling from ear to ear.
Valve does not currently offer any way to natively customize the Steam Controller’s sounds through Steam. We actually asked the company about it in April and Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge While “it’s possible that there’s going to be more both configuration and customization for this in the future,” the team isn’t focused on that right now. If Valve does create a sound customization tool, Griffis suggested it would be some kind of SDK or a tool that everyone can use, and if the team sees enough demand then Valve might consider building it.
Case in point: After letting Steam Deck users sideload their own custom boot videos that appear when you turn on your handheld, Valve made it an official Steam Deck feature so anyone can join in. It also offers a special place in the Steam Store to get additional bootloader videos from Valve. For now, Steam Haptics Singer will do.
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