PC games and MBT, Steam workaround

[shaefurr 1337]

So while waiting for MBT to have support for PC games, I just thought id mention how I currently launch PC games. It can be a time consuming process depending how many games you add, so keep that in mind.

 

First you need MBT and steam installed, and the steam plug-in for MBT. This obviously gets you easy access to Steams big picture mode and you can easily launch all your steam games.

 

 

So to get going with all your non steam games, first you'll need to go into your Steam library, and click "Add A Game".

 

After the window comes up click "Add a non-Steam game" and you'll be presented with this window, which you can check the boxes for your installed games you want to add, or click browse and find the games .exe, this will add them to the list if they arn't listed already.

 

After you have all the non Steam games you want to add checked, click Add Selected Programs.

 

 

Now you will be able to launch all your games from inside Steam, however you'll notice all the non-Steam games dont have any images or covers, so this is the next step.

 

You will need to use Steams default banner size of 460x215 to have the images match perfectly.

Without making your own, theres a TON of places to get the banners, simply Google "Steam Grids" and there's plenty of websites hosting them, and a ton of other people who have uploaded their collection of banners.

 

Here's a few places to grab some banners. http://www.steamgrids.com/ or http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2737170

 

After you get banners for all the non-Steam games you added, continue below.

 

At the top of Steam click View, then Games Grid.

 

Now that you're in Grid view, you can right click a game, and click Select Custom Image. Then just choose the banner you downloaded.

 

Repeat for each game.

 

 

While this is a time consuming process, it works great for launching PC games, the non steam games wont have any metadata or anything, but they do look nice and work. So if you're dying for PC games in MBT and want to waste some time setting this up, give it a try.

 

Here's an older screenshot of mine when I had added Dead Space 3 using this method. As you can see you can't tell a difference in the library, though when you enter a game you'll only have a play button and no other info.

 

 

[shaefurr 1337]

Just to add to this, if you want steam to have a wallpaper when entering a non steam game, just launch a game from steam and hit F12 while playing to take a screenshot, after leaving and re-entering the game in steam it will have the screenshot as the wallpaper. In Big Picture mode that is.