How to use a basic Steam emulator
Steam emu/emulator works by emulating the Steam client and makes the game think that Steam client is running in the background through a logged in account containing the game in the Steam library. Basic emus are usually libsteam_api.dylib + .ini file. There are several different kinds of good Steam emus available. I will be explaining how to use one of those in this tutorial. Most of the emus are similar to each other, so the same basics should work across the board.
Important Note: Not all emus work with all games, if you can't get some game working with the emu you first tried, try a different one.
General note about emus; "#" or ";" as the first symbol of a row in the .ini means that the line is just a comment, and therefore doesn't have a function. e.g. there might be a line like this: "#UnlockAllDLC=1". To unlock the DLC in this case, you'll need to remove the # symbol.
Decide what emulator you would like to use. In this part of the tutorial I will use ACTiVATED scene emu.
Find the AppID of your game. It's the number part of Steam store page url. e.g. AppID of 0rbitalis is 278440. (
http://store.steampowered.com/app/278440/) Another useful place to find AppIDs is SteamDB.
Copy emulators .ini file to /.app/Resources, and the libsteam_api.dylib to /.app/Plugins/CSteamworks.bundle/Contents/MacOS, or where ever the .dylib file is located.
Edit the .ini file, in this case activated.ini. With every emu you will need to change at least the AppID to the correct one.
Open .ini on any text editor. Browse through the .ini file or use the search function to find the line containing "appid". In ACTiVATEDs emu it's "AppID=000000". Now change the number to the correct one, e.g. to "AppID=278440". Save changes.
If the game supports several languages but you can't change the language in game options, you can sometimes use the "Language =" line to change the language of the game. When uploading games to GGn, use English by default if available!
Now you are ready to test if your release works without Steam.
Tip: Some games require you to have original libsteam_api.dylib in the game folder in order for game to work. Before copying cracked libsteam_api.dylib, rename the original to libsteam_api.dylib_ to see if that is the case.
