Since the release of the Steam Deck, Valve fans have gotten very familiar with the idea of the Proton compatibility layer that allows games written for Windows to run capably on the Linux-based SteamOS (though Valve's efforts in this realm date back further than that). To get more games running on the SteamOS-powered Steam Frame, though, Valve is relying on two additional compatibility layers that are new to the Steam architecture.

The first, FEX, is Valve's port of fex-emu, an open source project that emulates x86 processor instructions on an Arm chipset. Since 2018, what started as a small cross-platform emulation project has grown to include "an advanced binary recompiler that supports all modern extensions of the x86(-64) instruction set," according to the Fex website. The emulator can also make calls to graphics libraries like OpenGL and Vulkan to reduce overhead and uses "code caching to minimize stuttering as much as possible," according to Steam's own developer documentation.

While Proton was based on the pre-existing Wine conversion tool, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge last year that the company has been funding Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek since the project was just a prototype. Back then, Valve was already anticipating that "close to a decade of work [would be] needed before [Fex-emu] would be robust enough people could rely on it for their libraries."

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Here at Ars, we're intimately familiar with data leaks surrounding Valve's games, hardware, and the workings of Steam itself. But nothing could have prepared us for this weekend's "terarelease" encompassing more than 12TB of content related to seemingly every title available on Steam between 2003 and 2013.

What's being sold as an "as-complete-as-possible ... content server dump" of Steam's defunct "Steam2" server architecture from that time period is now circulating around via a BitTorrent tracker that Valve seems unlikely to ever completely purge from the Internet. The massive collection includes thousands of "depots" representing what seems to be every version of every game uploaded to those old Steam2 servers. That includes public release builds, of course, but in many cases also covers previously unseen pre-release, prototype, and playtest versions of popular titles published by Valve and third-party Steam publishers.

Steam2: Electric Boogaloo

The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.

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