On the recent post about Steam controller shortages, I saw several comments about the Steam controller not being usable outside of Steam. I wanted to explain more in depth about how the controller works without Steam, and what your options are for universal support.
First, when steam isn’t running the controller works in “lizard mode”, where it works as a combination of a keyboard and mouse. This is meant to let users navigate non-controller friendly interfaces like the desktop, boot menus, etc. Once steam starts running, it will replace this with a customizable “desktop” layout, but the base lizard mode will work without steam.
For playing non-steam games, your main options are:
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Add non-steam games to Steam. This is probably the intended way to use it, this will let you easily use Steam input/big picture mode/etc. The main catch for this is that it probably won’t work for Gamepass games on windows (see 3rd-party software below).
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Hold the menu/start button for 3 seconds, which will swap the desktop layout to a traditional controller. You can also remap the desktop layout to be a standard controller. Requires steam running in the background.
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SDL support - any games that support SDL will have native support for the Steam controller. Any games or emulators that use this will not only support the steam controller, but will also allow mapping their backbuttons/trackpads/etc. No Steam required.
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3rd Party Software - SteamlessController allows you to use the steam controller as a standard gamepad on windows without Steam running.
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3rd Party Software - Steam Controller Remapper Originally a fork of Steamless, but now has it’s own remapping software, xbox game bar widget support, and can automatically swap the controller between normal steam mode (for steam games) and specific profiles for non-steam games.
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3rd Party Software - SISR requires Steam to be running in the background (although Steamless support is planned), but allows you to use SteamInput profiles while still having the Steam Controller appear like a standard controller to games. This can help with any games that don’t play nicely with normal steam input, such as gamepass games, some anti-cheat, emulators, etc. This will also let you use the Steam Deck as a controller without having to stream your game to the deck. Works on Windows and Linux.
If anyone has any other recommendations let me know.
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Great info. Didn’t know about “menu/start button for 3 seconds” - seems like the easiest option
A few notes on Linux.
Recent versions of Wine use SDL2 to implement XInput support. Any game running on a decently new version will work with the SC2 out of the box. Run
wine control joy.cpl(with the correct WINEPREFIX obviously) to configure and test both XInput and DirectInput devices.This unfortunately causes issues with SISR. Since both SISR (through Steam Input) and the Wine game (through SDL) process the input events separately, using SISR will result in double inputs. This can be fixed by telling SDL to ignore the SC2 altogether by passing this environment variable to the game:
SDL_GAMECONTROLLER_IGNORE_DEVICES='0x28de/0x1304'Good to know!
🏆
sc-controller is the solution I used, but they are currently in the process of adding the new controller. There is a fork that has already implemented it, although it needs to be rewritten to merge, since that fork’s changes are vibe coded. Here is that fork
Its well designed software, and it even has quick switching between user created layouts and an overlay.
Linux only.
I started to add sc-controller, but stopped when I saw the last commit was 3 years ago, well before the new steam controller.
Not surprised there’s a vibe coded fork.
Yeah it was inactive for a while, but was forked, and that ones last commit was 4 months ago, and is now the canonical git repo. Thats the one I linked. Then just a little while ago it was forked again with those vibecoded changes. I presume they are going to reimplement it properly, there is an open issue where they are trying to clean up the fork for merging.
GloSC used to be the way to go, in order to use the original Steam Controller with UWP games from Xbox gamepass. It is no longer developed or maintained due to ViGEmBus being EoL’d. Could still work though.
Seems the author of GloSC has moved on to SISR, which you already know about.
I’m mostly looking forward to the SDL3 support. Mostly for emulators. RetroArch I think already has support for it. I still need to test that. Hopefully other emulators will catch up. Maybe its time to “switch” off from Yuzu to a modern Switch emulator, because Yuzu won’t support it probably most likely definitely. :D
I recently tried getting SteamlessController running, but had no luck. It seems like it may not have been updated for the most recent firmware version.
