Steam Frame Gets New Feature a Day After Player Asks Valve for Improvement

Valve responded to a Steam forum request for external CD-ROM drive support on the Steam Frame within a day, and a related code change appeared on GitHub less than 10 minutes after the company’s reply.

Players recently noticed another example of Valve’s customer focus. On the Steam forum, a user asked the company to let him connect external CD-ROM drives to the Steam Frame.

The user, Aiodensghost, explained that this would let him watch movies on the road and install an older game. He still has a physical copy of Need for Speed: Carbon (2006), which is no longer sold:

Why can’t I use an external disc drive? I wanted to watch a movie on the go on my Steam Frame, and I thought I could easily connect the external drive I used on my PC. It turns out the Frame can’t power the drive, and even if it could, it has no drivers to read discs. Valve, this didn’t just stop me from watching a movie. IT STOPPED ME FROM INSTALLING A GAME FROM 2006 THAT IS NO LONGER SOLD. You no longer sell NFS Carbon (f*** EA), and even though I have the disc, the Frame can’t read it.
Can I,
PLEASE, get the ability to use an optical drive?

A player asked Valve to improve the Steam Frame, and the new feature appeared the next day — Image source: Valve

The next day, a Valve representative with the username gaberowe replied: “We’ll look into this, thanks for reporting.” Less than 10 minutes passed between that reply on the forum and a commit from developer Gabe Rowe in the headset’s kernel repository on GitHub, “deckard-linux-no-oopsies.” He enabled an existing Linux kernel feature rather than building a new one from scratch.

That does not mean full disc drive support will arrive on the Steam Frame in the next update. In the meantime, users can install the modified kernel themselves instead of waiting for an official release.

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