Turn your Windows PC into a Steam Machine
With the upcoming Steam Machines, Valve is making a big play to bring PC gaming into the living room, but if you’re unwilling to wait for them to launch this fall, we’ve got a big tip that will help you bring PC gaming into your living room today.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about Valve’s “Big Picture Mode.” This mode is basically a 10-foot UI for Steam that’s designed to work well with controllers in a living room setting. Problem is, it’s a little annoying having to set up a keyboard and mouse, just so that you can launch Steam’s Big Picture Mode from the Windows desktop. Luckily, there’s a way to set up your PC to boot directly into Steam Big Picture Mode upon startup. Here’s how you do it:
Create a text file (you can use Windows Notepad) and call it “BigPicture.cmd”. Inside the file, paste in the following lines:
@echo off title Enable Steam Big Picture @ Startup echo Enabling boot to Steam Big Picture mode for all users... %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe load HKLM\DefaultUser C:\Users\Default\NTUSER.DAT %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe add HKLM\DefaultUser\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v SteamBigPicture /d "\"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe\" -bigpicture" %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe unload HKLM\DefaultUser echo. echo Steam Big Picture mode enabled for all users! pause
After you've saved the file, right click it and run the file as Administrator. Type in any administrator password you may have. From here, you’re nearly done, but you’ll need to create a new Windows user profile after this step to boot into Big Picture Mode, as it only affects new user accounts created after this step. We called our new login “Steam Big Picture Mode,” but you can call it whatever you want. Another requirement is that this process requires Steam to be installed to the default C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam folder; otherwise, you will need to change the path name in the script above to get it working.
The next time you boot your Windows PC up, it will briefly boot up to the Windows desktop and then after a few short seconds, will launch Steam’s Big Picture Mode.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1Ml8MT0
