Sunshine + Moonlight + Dish: the cloud-gaming-at-home trio

Sunshine and Moonlight are the open-source pair most people use to stream games from their own PC. Sunshine runs on the gaming PC and sends its picture and sound to another screen. Moonlight runs on that screen, whether it’s a TV box, a tablet, a Steam Deck, or a phone, and shows the stream. Both are fast, good-looking, and free.

The part they leave awkward is the controller. This post is about adding Dish as the third piece, so the picture goes to whatever screen you like and the controller goes wherever you’re sitting.

A quick recap

If you’re new to the stack:

• Sunshine, or a fork of it like Apollo, runs on your gaming PC and streams its picture and sound.
• Moonlight runs on your TV box, tablet, Steam Deck, or phone and shows that stream.
• Both are free, open source, and available for nearly every platform.

If you haven’t set them up yet, do that first. Both projects have good guides. Come back once a game from your PC is playing on your TV.

The controller problem

In a typical Sunshine and Moonlight setup, the controller connects to whatever device runs Moonlight. Streaming to a Shield TV? The Shield’s gamepad is your controller. Streaming to a Steam Deck? The Deck’s own controls.

That works until:

1. The box running Moonlight has a poor gamepad story, like many smart TVs, and you want a real controller in your lap.
2. You want couch co-op, and getting several controllers working through one streaming box is fiddly.
3. You want to use a phone or tablet you already own as the controller, while the TV shows the game.

Where Dish fits in

Dish splits the controller from the screen. Moonlight carries the picture to your TV. Dish carries the controller from your hand to the PC.

gaming PC ─── (video over Moonlight) ───► your TV / Steam Deck / iPad
gaming PC ◄── (controller over Dish) ──── your phone in your hand

The screen and the controller are independent, so either one can drop and come back without bothering the other.

There are two ways to do the controller half:

• Through Satellite. Satellite is Dish’s receiver. It runs on the gaming PC next to Sunshine, and it’s the faster path. It works with or without a stream, and on Windows it carries everything a DualSense can do, including HD haptics and adaptive triggers.
• Straight to the host. Dish can pair with a Sunshine, Apollo, or Wolf host the way Moonlight does and join as a controller only, with nothing new to install. It carries buttons, sticks, gyro, the touchpad, rumble, the lightbar, and battery. The Sunshine, Apollo, and Wolf guide covers that path.

Setup with Satellite

This assumes Sunshine and Moonlight already work.

1. Install Dish on your controller device

Get Dish on your phone from Google Play or GitHub. If the controller you want to use is plugged into a laptop or a Steam Deck, install Dish for Windows or Dish for Linux there instead.

2. Install Satellite on the gaming PC

Grab Satellite from the downloads page and run it. It adds a small dish icon to your system tray, and it runs fine on the same PC as Sunshine.

3. Pair

Open Dish. It finds your gaming PC on its own. Tap it and type the 4-digit PIN from Satellite’s dashboard. Dish remembers the PC from then on.

4. Keep the streaming box’s controller out of it

If the device running Moonlight has its own controller connected, the game gets input from both. Unplug or unpair that controller, so the one in Dish is the only one the game hears.

5. Play

Open Moonlight, connect to Sunshine, and launch the game. The video plays on your TV, and the controller in your hand drives it.

Why this beats a cloud-gaming subscription

Cloud services have gotten good, but a home setup still has advantages they can’t match:

• Your library is your library. There’s no list of supported titles. If it runs on your PC, you can play it.
• No queue. Your PC is always available to you.
• Mods work. Cloud services sandbox their games. Here you play whatever your PC runs, modded Skyrim included.
• Lower latency. A home stream doesn’t cross the internet.
• Resolution and frame rate. Sunshine streams in 4K at high frame rates if your PC and your screen keep up.
• No subscription. Sunshine, Moonlight, and Dish are all free.

Couch co-op

This is where splitting the controller from the screen pays off most. Each friend pairs their phone to the same Satellite once, Moonlight shows the game on the TV, and every phone is its own controller. Cuphead, Streets of Rage 4, and Overcooked all work this way, with no extra hardware beyond what’s already in everyone’s pockets.

Common pitfalls

• Use 5 GHz or 6 GHz Wi-Fi for both Moonlight and Dish. 2.4 GHz works, but you’ll feel it.
• Wire your gaming PC. Ethernet on the PC leaves the Wi-Fi airtime for the screen and the controllers.
• One controller per player. If the streaming box also sends a controller, the game gets doubled input.
• Watch aggressive battery savers. A few phones throttle background apps hard. If yours does, exempt Dish from battery optimization.

Read more

• Use your phone as a controller for Sunshine, Apollo, or Wolf
• DualSense haptics on PC without a cable
• How Dish works
• Why the apps are called “Dish” and “Satellite”, a nod to the broadcasting metaphor Sunshine and Moonlight started

If this stack made your setup better, tips keep our part of it going.