14 DAY TRIAL // It's now possible to play old games from the SNES era on SteamOS, thanks to an application named Ice, which has been made to work with this operating system.
Ice had already been available for Steam, but a couple of developers made sure it would also work with SteamOS. The initial release has been marked as 0.1.0 and it shows the state of the development. It works, but installing it and figuring out how it can be used will take some time.
The idea that you can play this kind of games in Steam is not a bad one, especially since emulators are already working on this platform, and there is even controller support. Why not take advantage of a collection of thousands of games that can be downloaded and used for free, and which in many cases are just as good as the ones released today?
Ice for SteamOS is awesome
Even if it's still under development and it will take some time to make it more friendly, the idea that you can play all of these old titles in SteamOS makes a lot of sense.
"Use Steam to play all your old games! Just because old consoles aren't sold anymore doesn't mean you can't enjoy their games. Ice leverages Steam's Big Picture mode to turn it into an emulator frontend (similar to Hyperspin). It accomplishes this by creating folders in specified locations on the user's hard drive, then adding any ROMs that are placed in these folders to Steam as non-Steam games," reads the GitHub entry.
It's not an easy installation and users need to follow the instructions on GitHub with care, but if everything goes well, they should be able to see the games in their library.
Many of these titles are considered to be abandonware, which means that anyone can download and play them legally.