APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

howto» gaming
Play PC games on your
smartphone
If you’ve got the data and a PC, Alex Cox has the solution.
We’re not short of options
when it comes to
streaming games.
We’ve talked in these
pages about the immensely useful
Steam In-Home Streaming, we’ve
covered the likes of XSplit, which
sends your games up to Twitch and
other online streaming services,
and we’ve even looked at ways you
can beam console games through your
network and play them on your PC.
Well, add Remotr to the list. It’s very
flexible, offering up client apps
for smartphones, tablets and other
Windows PCs, happily streaming over
mobile phone networks if you have
the data allocation for it, and it’s
incredibly simple to set up and use.
Let’s preface this a little, though,
with a couple of caveats. One: don’t
expect ultra performance or lag-free
gaming. Remotr’s solution is quick and
very well coded, but it’s not going to be
suitable for the twitchiest games,
particularly if you’re streaming
outside of your local network. It also
scales down the quality of streaming
(though not the quality of the source
game) to meet your network
specifications, so if you’re obsessed
with uncompressed graphical fidelity,
you might be best staying at your
home PC.
B
A
GET THE SERVER
1
Remotr works on a client/server
model, which means you first need to
install its server app on your gaming
PC. Head to remotrapp.com, scroll down
until you find the relevant option
[Image A] and download the Windows
Streamer app. Run it to install Remotr,
open up the app, and click the ‘New
Account’ button to set up an account.
You may wish to sign up with a burner
email account from the likes of
guerrillamail.com for a couple of reasons:
Perhaps you’re concerned about
Pi Remote Gaming
If you’re looking to send gaming
streams to your Raspberry Pi, you
may be tired, as we are, of waiting
for Remotr’s promised Pi app.
There is a solution, however, in the
form of the decidedly less userfriendly
Parsec (parsec.tv). Using
UDP (rather than TCP/IP) to stream
at super-low latency, it enables you
to install a server on your gaming
PC, a client on your Raspberry Pi
3, and beam games from one to
the other. There’s a slight problem,
though: in our experiments,
we’ve found it a little unstable and
somewhat unwilling to work with
certain hardware configurations.
Theoretically, you should be good
to stream even on machines with
Intel embedded graphics — your
results may vary.
If you have a decent Nvidia
card, there’s another solution:
Moonlight, née Limelight
(moonlight-stream.com), an
open-source client for Nvidia’s
Gamestream protocol. There are
versions of Moonlight Embedded,
the Pi client, for both Raspbian and
Arch, though these are unofficial
ports, so we can’t vouch for them
working perfectly with your
particular hardware setup.
88 www.apcmag.com