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Castor Game Stream (1 PC, multiple players) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-09-21 15:00:08
Imported:
2023-03

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Content

Playing Windows games on a portable device has always been something people wanted. Up until now you only had two options:

  • Fork over big cash to get yourself a dedicated Windows handheld
  • Or stream your games from your gaming PC and / or Notebook, rendering it inaccessible for regular use while your game of choice is running

Castor intends to offer you a better way to stream your games.

One that doesn't render your regular PC inaccessible, allows multiple players (or devices) to utilize your system at the same time and most importantly, is minimally intrusive and gets out of your way when it should.

I personally use it to share one Windows handheld (Steam Deck on my end) with one Android handheld so my wife can join in on some co-op games, but your use-case may vary.

The requirements:

  • Your PC must run Windows 10 or Windows 11
  • Your CPU must support VT-d (Intel) / SVM (AMD) (you'll get a "Something went wrong!" error if these aren't enabled in your BIOS or your CPU doesn't support them)

Some reminders:

  • Windows 10 will ALWAYS use the first enumerated GPU (which sucks on Intel/NVidia hybrid systems because the Intel IGP happens to be the first enumerated GPU, use Windows 11 to work around this as you will be able to select which card is used)
  • Having a hardware-encoder compatible GPU boosts performance a LOT (the lack of such is why splitting the Valve Steam Deck hovers around 35-50FPS rather than a rock solid 60FPS)

So how do you use Castor?

  • Install Castor.msi on your PC / Notebook
  • You will now have a Castor icon in your system tray
  • Click on the Castor icon, pick "Create Castor PC" and follow the wizard
  • Click on the Castor icon again, pick your Castor PC (take note of its ID, its the number inside the brackets) and click on "Start"
  • For Android: Install Pollux.apk, Castor's Moonlight fork, on your Android device (you might have to uninstall the regular Moonlight version first)
  • For Android: Open Moonlight and tap the + symbol
  • For Android: Type in your PC's IP address, followed by : and the Castor PC ID, for my PC that would be 192.168.1.111:1 for the first created Castor PC
  • For QT clients: Install Moonlight (via DMG file, Flatpak, Windows setup, etc.)
  • For QT clients: Open Moonlight and tap the + symbol
  • For QT clients: Type in your PC's IP address, followed by : and the (Castor PC ID * 50) + 47989, for my PC that would be 192.168.1.111:48039 for the first created Castor PC
  • You should see your Castor PC in the app now, click on it and take note of the 4-digit pin it shows you
  • Back on your PC, click on the Castor icon again, pick your Castor PC and click on "Pair", it will open the Sunshine control panel where, after setting a password, you can enter the previously noted pin in the PIN menu
  • Your device can now access your Castor PC, install games and play them, all while leaving your main PC unaffected
  • Repeat these steps as often as you like to create additional Castor PCs

You can also find a minimal video tutorial here, or a more in-depth look at the system in action by Russ from RetroGameCorps here.

How do I share a Host PC drive with a Castor PC?

On the Host PC:

  • Open the start menu
  • Type in "cmd", find the "Command Prompt" and click on "Run as administrator"
  • Type "reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f" into the "Command Prompt" window and press the Enter key
  • Choose a suitable password that only you know and keep note of it, I'll refer to it from here on out as "Password"
  • Type "net user CastorShare Password /add" into the "Command Prompt" window and press the Enter key
  • Type "net localgroup administrators CastorShare /add" into the "Command Prompt" window and press the Enter key
  • Type "explorer" into the "Command Prompt" window and press the Enter key to open the "File Explorer"
  • Navigate to "This PC" inside the "File Explorer" window
  • Right-click the drive you wish to share
  • Click on "Properties"
  • Click on the "Sharing" tab
  • Click on the "Advanced Sharing..." button
  • Tick the "Share this folder" checkbox
  • Click on the "Permissions" button
  • Tick the "Full Control" Allow checkbox
  • Click on the "OK" button (2 times)
  • Click on the "Close" button

On the Castor PC:

  • Right-click the start menu icon and click on "File Explorer" to open it
  • Navigate to "This PC" inside the "File Explorer" window
  • Click on the "..." button (aka. "See more" button)
  • Click on "Map network drive"
  • Choose a drive letter (any unused letter will do)
  • Type "\\172.31.1.1\HostPCDriveLetter$" into the "Folder" text-box (substituting HostPCDriveLetter for the Host PC drive's actual letter, if you're sharing the C-drive of your Host PC this should read "\\172.31.1.1\c$")
  • Tick the "Connect using different credentials" checkbox
  • Click on the "Finish" button
  • A "Windows Security" dialog will pop up
  • Type in "YourHostPCName\CastorShare" into the "User name" text-box (if your Host-PC is called MyPC this should read "MyPC\CastorShare")
  • Type in the previously chosen password from the Host PC steps above into the "Password" text-box
  • Tick the "Remember my credentials" checkbox
  • Click the "OK" button
  • The "Windows Security" dialog might pop up a second time, if so just confirm the saved credentials
  • Your Castor PC should now have access to your host's drive, repeat these steps as necessary for additional drives and / or Castor PCs

Special tip:

Add your Host PC's Steam library folder to your Castor PCs Steam installation and set it as the default install location.

This will save huge amounts of space as each game only has to be installed once per physical PC.

Where can I find the open-source components of Castor?

All open-source components have been made available via GitHub.

These include the custom mirror driver, Sunshine build and a NAT-compatible Android version of Moonlight dubbed Pollux.

The QT-version of Moonlight is NAT-compatible by default (unlike its Android counterpart) and, as such, hasn't been forked.

And finally... a disclaimer of sorts...

Castor is a work-in-progress project, as such it might have bugs, which means you might be running into some issues along the way. (I hope not, but I can't rule it out.)

Should you do so, please get in touch and leave feedback so I can address whatever issue you might be having.

The system tray icon will notify you when a new build is available as well.

Before we move onto the changelog...

Version 1.0.5.0

  • Fixed a internet connectivity related crash in the "Create Castor PC" wizard
  • Added support for Windows Home & Core editions

Version 1.0.4.0

  • Fixed OpenGL & Vulkan (You'll have to delete & re-create your PC for this one.)

Version 1.0.3.0

  • Added a "Update Drivers" option to fix post-Host-GPU-driver-update issues (if your Castor PC refuses to boot after a Host PC GPU driver update then this is the button you want to press)

Version 1.0.2.0

  • Fixed a "Something went wrong!" error that affected Japanese Windows users

Version 1.0.1.0

  • Fixed a "Something went wrong!" error caused by a disabled auto-mount option
  • Fixed a "Something went wrong!" error caused by a non-existant virtual disk default directory
  • Fixed a "Something went wrong!" error that affected Chinese Windows users
  • Fixed a black-screen issue caused by certain high-resolution clients

Version 1.0.0.0

  • Initial release

And some honorable mentions...

To all the people who took some time out of their day to help debug things and make Castor even better!

  • Hades (for letting me borrow his PC to fix the auto-mount & directory issues in Version 1.0.0.0, check out his YouTube channel here)
  • trexmx (for letting me borrow his PC so I could add Chinese Windows support to Castor)
  • moto (for letting me borrow his PC so I could add Japanese Windows support to Castor, check out his YouTube channel here)
  • megadrive (for reminding me that motherboards with disabled VT-d / SVM options exist)
  • dancue (for reporting some post-Host-GPU-driver-update issues)
  • Thor (for helping me with the internal Windows 10 tests, he's one of the cool guys operating the RetroHandhelds Discord server)

Files

Introducing Castor - Split and Stream your PC!

Castor is a new app that will allow you to stream from your PC to an Android device using a process known as paravirtualization. This means you can allocate a portion of you PC's resources to create a virtual machine environment which can then be used for game streaming without disrupting your main PC's functionality. UPDATE! Since making the video, Castor has been updated to include Windows, Linux, and Mac clients, meaning you can stream from one PC to the other if you'd like -- no need to only use Android devices. Additionally, you can now share the hard drive space with the host PC, so that you won't need to create a huge Castor PC partition for storage. Links to the updated instructions are below. To access Castor, check out Black Seraph's Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/blackseraph Written guide with links and updates: https://retrogamecorps.com/2022/09/23/introducing-castor-split-and-stream-your-pc/ Note that after making this video I figured out that touchscreen works fine, I was just using it incorrectly. The screen acts like a trackpad, so you slide your finger across it to move the mouse, and tap on the screen to click the mouse. I was expecting to use it like a touchscreen tablet, hence my confusion. Timestamps: 00:00 introduction 02:24 setup guide 07:43 testing out functionality and gameplay 09:41 resource monitoring and other use cases 12:02 summary and conclusion If you want to support the channel, please consider Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/retrogamecorps Find me on Discord! https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds Theme song written by Jim Gray of Our Ghosts: https://ourghosts.bandcamp.com/track/my-first-day-at-the-retro-game-corps Note that this description may contain affiliate links. By clicking on an affiliate link and buying something, I may earn a small commission of the sale at no extra cost to you. You can read more about that here: https://retrogamecorps.com/about/ This video is for entertainment and educational purposes only. #Castor #PCgaming #RetroHandheld

Comments

Anonymous

When I try using the Castor Wizard the "Support Files" section shows "Temporarily unavailable". This prevents me from creating the VM and using the software. Does anyone know of a fix?

Anonymous

Hi there, just installed and setup Castor. Seems to be very easy to setup and start a VM. I did this on my sons PC as he as hardware to spare so my daughter can play on a handheld, Im running into an easy that I cant figure out thought. My son has all his games on his C drive and this drive I wanted to share to my daughter, using the above share technique the driver comes up as a network drive on the VM, everytime you run a .exe you get a promt this runs of network blabla.. and also had troubles getting epic games and steam games to show up as installed and not require to redownload again on VM. Am I missing a step here? Is there perhaps a way to share the hardrive @locally? if that makes sense? some games dont run, some comes up with a promt and no steam or epic games shows up as installed. Also seem to be unable to install directx which is required by many games in our library. Any help here is appreciated. Tried redoing VM twice..

Anonymous

This is so frustrating. I get a temporarily unavailable message in the support files section when trying to create a castor pc. idk whats wrong. everything else is green

Anonymous

"Temporarily unavailable" error here as well

Anonymous

Alright, so I found out that Microsoft since the beginning of march has banned new sales of products in Russia, and made the download of windows 11 ISO more restrictive (I'm not in Russia but I get an error when I try to download the ISO from Microsoft official servers).

Anonymous
>>104713963

This means that the error "Temporarily unavailable"is due to that. In a next update would be great if we could manually provide the ISO instead of downloading from Microsoft.

Anonymous

Castor gets stuck in "Installing Castor" and I've tried reinstalling, rebooting etc. It worked before so suddenly stopped. Any ideas whats going on?

Anonymous

Oh boy, just signed up for May to get the Castor App, however it is not working. Support Files "Temporarily unavailable" Is there a fix?

Anonymous

Is this project still alive?

Nexxus_D

This has worked for me successfully. Thanks. Would a version that launches linux distros be possible. Might try the idea.

ShabbyPenguin

Set this up and had it working on my xbox using the UWP moonlight found in the store. https://github.com/TheElixZammuto/moonlight-xbox now i can play emulators via my xbox again in retail mode. id love an iOS client version, perhaps it would be possible to https://github.com/TheElixZammuto/moonlight-xbox/blob/master/libgamestream/client.c#L187 use this tidbit and merge it upstream so that all moonlight clients could have port detection/castor support?

Anonymous

Hello, Is there a button prompt that lets you boot into the Android on RG353 when the Linux card is in? Holding the F does not work for me.