I’ve been using LaunchBox’s BigBox for my HTPC for years at this point to replicate a console-like experience as close as reasonably possible. When Microsoft announced they wanted to make that process easier due to their Xbox strategy shifts, I welcomed the changes. I wanted to document (both for myself and if it helps anyone else) the process I went through to get the system up and working.
I’ll be coming back and updating this as I finalize the setup. Essentially I’m thinking I’ll use steam big picture for all steam games, and bigbox for any legacy games.
Key Steps:
- Activate the xbox mode feature manually – I was not ‘selected’ to have the feature when the code was installed, so I had to follow these steps to get the feature ‘activated.’
- Download ViVeTool and extract the folder.
- Open Command Prompt as Administrator and navigate to the folder.
- Run the command:
vivetool /enable /id:51473685(Note: ID may vary; verify the latest). - Restart the PC
- Set ‘handheld mode’ at Windows level to activate more xbox mode features – The new xbox mode doesn’t seem to be inherently designed for an HTPC desktop, so you have to tell windows you have a ‘handheld’.
- Open Registry Editor: Press Win + R, type regedit, and hit Enter.
- Navigate to the OEM Key: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\OEM
- Create/Modify DeviceForm:
- If the OEM key doesn’t have a DeviceForm value, right-click OEM, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and name it DeviceForm.
- Right-click DeviceForm, select Modify, set the Base to Hexadecimal, and the value data to 2e
- Restart: Restart your PC.
- Install Omniconsole
- https://github.com/8bit2qubit/OmniConsole
- This will allow xbox mode to launch steam big picture instead of the xbox app on reboot, to do this I had to set handheld mode (noted above).
- Customize the x-box mode via task scheduler
- Start the apps you really want to have running in standard windows and Xbox mode. I had to start the home assistant agent (which sleeps and wakes the PC when I turn off and on the TV respectively).
Current issues:
- HDMI handshake / HDR breaks when resuming from sleep – This has nothing to do with xbox mode, more tied I haven’t gotten to the bottom of why this is happening yet, something to do with a sync issue between the tv and the PC graphics card on wake. I’ve setup a script to fire on resume to see if that fixes it. If so I’ll detail it here after testing.
- Xbox mode breaks joytokey that I was using to pull up MSI Afterburner overlays for performance. Unfortunately steam has no controller mapping for big picture performance overlay information just keyboard keys. And since the xbox button is dragooned by xbox mode, steam chords are also broken since you have to hold the xbox button for them to work. I tried 4 different key mappers with no luck. So right now I am using my keyboard to pull up the overlays.
