How to play to Half Life Alyx on Oculus Quest without a gaming computer
Paperspace + 5ghz Wifi + Virtual Desktop
I bought recently an oculus Quest, and I really wanted play Half Life Alyx. But my old Mac Book Pro doesn’t have an usb-c for Link nor a graphic card suitable for this. How do we do? All the post on reddit talk about a solution, using Shadow (remote video game computer service) and 5ghz Wifi. Fine, let’s do that!
But unfortunately Shadow is victim of his success on this lockdown time, I can’t have access to an account before until July and it’s march…
I can’t wait so long! Here another working solution:
Paperspace + 5ghz Wifi + Virtual Desktop
Here are all the steps you need to do before playing Alyx on your Oculus Quest:
WIFI
First check if your home wifi is 5ghz. You can see that in your router config or internet box information.
Make sure your Oculus Quest is on 5ghz. It’s useless to go further if you don’t have a proper 5Ghz Wifi.
PAPERSPACE
Paperspace provide cloud gaming machine, you will need an account. With this link you will have 10$ free credits (to give a try):
https://paperspace.io/&R=9JOA1JO
you will need to create a new machine by following those steps:
- Core -> Machines -> +
- Select the nearest location for your server
- Select a public template for gaming Parsec
- Chose a machine with a dedicate GPU hourly. A dedicated GPU is important because shared one can’t have drivers updates on it.
- I advice you to select 250G minimum storage. Windows + Alyx weight more than 100go.
- In Options I advice you to auto-shutdown after one hour inactivity and not a day.
- fill your payment information
Create your paper space!
Congratulation, now you run your machine and you will need to update your GPU drivers.
(I’m using the windows virtual keyboard when keys doesn’t match with my mac Keyboard )
UPDATE YOUR GPU DRIVERS:
Don’t run a windows update, it’s forbidden on thoses machines. Follow thoses steps:
INSTALL OCULUS WINDOWS APP
skip the “select your device” step.
INSTALL STEAM
In order to play Alyx or other Steam VR games, you will need to install steam on your machine.
and next install Steam VR in Steam.
Buy and install Alyx. Remember if all of this process doesn’t work for you, you can still ask for money back if you played less than 2 hours.
INSTALL VIRTUAL DESKTOP
You will need to install virtual desktop streamer on your virtual machine. Set your name and save.
And you also need yo install the app in your oculus quest. You will need to pay around $20|€ to access to your remote desktop from your oculus quest.
When you bought it on the store, you need to also install it also on sidequest.
I won’t talk about sidequest installation, there is many tutorials online.
PLAY!
Now you can play to your game, make sure you rebooted your Oculus Quest and your virtual Machine to be sure.
When your remote machine is on, run virtual desktop on your Oculus Quest. You will see virtual desktop menu on the right. On the left bottom side a Launch Steam VR button will appear. Run Alyx game from there or from the Game tab on Virtual desktop.
And if you have too much lag, go to config tab and change parameters. It can help.
Hope this post can help you to experience Alyx on your Oculus Quest. Please share if you have any issue, maybe we can find solution together.
You can play to other games on steam with this configuration, people made a list to know what’s working on different setups.
