Friday, November 12, 2010

The magic of bluetooth

I've been wanting to get a game controller for a while, so that I could more easily play emulator games on my computers, but one way or another I never really got around to it. The trouble is that the market for PC game controllers isn't very big, and is as such not very well served.

This afternoon, though, I was out shopping and decided that enough was enough: it was time to get myself a controller. Rather than get a PC game controller, though, I instead opted for a PS3 DualShock 3 controller, with the assumption that I'd be able to make it work with my computers, since it's just a bluetooth device after all.

I figured I might need to do some tinkering or scrounging for some hacked drivers or something, but much to my delight it turns out that OS X has built-in support for the DualShock 3 controller, so all I had to do was plug it in to sync/charge it, and it immediately connected via bluetooth and provided full HID capability.

This pleases me.

I haven't managed to get it connected to my Wintendo, though, as my PC currently lacks bluetooth. I've added a bluetooth dongle to my xmas list, though, so hopefully that problem won't persist forever.