Prebuilt Steam Machine faceplate screens are here, delivering decent, surprisingly cheaper alternatives to Valve-approved DIY builds
If you own a Steam Machine, and still cling to the misconception that my budget faceplate ideas aren’t good enough for you, you basically have three options for front panel customisation. The first is to grab something off Etsy or suchlike. The second is take advantage of Valve’s open-source Inkterface proj...
If you own a Steam Machine, and still cling to the misconception that my budget faceplate ideas aren’t good enough for you, you basically have three options for front panel customisation. The first is to grab something off Etsy or suchlike. The second is take advantage of Valve’s open-source Inkterface project to build yourself an E-Ink display, onto which you can electronically daub performance monitoring info. The third is to end up with more or less the same panel as option two, but have someone else make it for you. That’s what arch accessory makers JSAUX are proposing with their Steam Machine E-Ink and Pixel Matrix faceplates, which go on sale today after a few weeks of preening around the case mod scene.
I’ve been using both on my Machine at home, and they’re quite good fun. The E-Ink faceplate, for which I sense the greater internet buzz, is a crisp, tidy little black-and-white panel, while the PixelMatrix trades detail density for colour and retro charm. Both have a few different display modes, switchable in SteamOS’s quick settings menu (via some clever integration with the Decky Loader plugin tool), and while I had to set this up manually, JSAUX say the requisite software will be downloadable via Steam itself from early October. Truly, it’s all the results of a DIY mod and more, conveniently pre-prepared for people who don’t own soldering irons.
Original reporting appears on the publisher’s site.
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