The Steam Controller is a device capable of many interesting feats. It’s intended to act simply as an input device, and yet, it can run games all on its own. As [Owen Feldman] has demonstrated, by having the Steam Controller play Zork.
[Owen] took quite an interesting route to get the there: he wrote a Rust program to emulate the Intel 8080 CPU and CP/M, as one does. This was ported to the Steam Controller, which emulates the CPU and memory on its own internal processor. I/O is streamed over USB, since the Steam Controller lacks a keyboard or screen. The CP/M disk lives in the controller, but the Zork disk data is streamed over USB as well.
If you’re wondering how [Owen] got all this running on the controller, he explains on his personal website. He used what appears to be an undocumented tool included with Steam that allows flashing firmware on the device. Helpfully, Valve also include the original firmware in the same folder, unsigned and only relying on a simple CRC checksum. [Owen] bricked his controller a couple times experimenting with this tool and loading his own firmware, but all came good in the end.
The Steam Controller is probably the oddest device to run CP/M for a while, but hey—it’s a neat party trick. Not much is going to top the auto-docking hack from a few months ago, though.