This actually gives controllers an advantage over a mouse and keyboard in areas where the keyboard is used for movement, which is restricted to digital controls unless you’re Ben Heck. Instead they notice how hard you pull a trigger, or in exactly what direction and how far you’re pushing a stick. The difference between analog sticks/buttons and digital ones is that analog controls don’t deal with absolute states like on/off. You have four shoulder buttons, two of which are analog, and four normal digital game buttons. You have start and select buttons, which work like you’d expect depending on the game, with the start button often working like Escape on a PC. You have a d-pad, which on the special edition controller that came out a couple of years ago (wireless only) can be switched from 4 way mode to 8 way mode. You have two analog sticks, one mounted higher on the controller than the other. Most people are familiar with the Xbox 360 controller, but I’ll quickly go over the design.
Bottom line, whether or not the controller will install itself or not seems to depend on both OS and chance, so I’d suggest googling for an OS-specific solution if you should encounter the issue.
I have also seen YouTube videos of the wireless adapter used on Windows RT, and the same method of manually browsing for drivers was used there. However, since the solution I found online (installing drivers manually) was for the official adapter, I think not. Since my wireless adapter was a knockoff, however I don’t know if that’s the reason why it happened.
The drivers are built into Windows, so even the manual installation only meant browsing local drivers and finding the one for the Xbox 360 wireless adapter, but it’s still a but of an issue when this happens. The original wireless adapter I had required me to browse the drivers manually on my computer, while the wired controller installed itself without problems. I still have the wireless adapter and controller, but the wired controller works best for my needs. I like playing with a controller, so I went out and bought the wired USB version of the controller, which can connect to both Xbox 360 consoles and Windows computers over USB. It had some issues, partly due to the replacement shell of the controller being a bit off, partly because of some USB bandwidth issues I had. The Xbox 360 might be 7 years old and due for an upgrade, but its controllers- which are fully compatible with Windows- are in the prime of their lives.Ī while ago I started using the wireless adapter I bought for using a resurrected (broken controller that I replaced the shell of) Xbox 360 controller on Android with my PC, like it was designed for. You could lug around a mouse and a keyboard, or you could go the console route, and hook up a controller. On a tablet, the complete lack of both those two things is definitely an issue. On a laptop, the lack of a mouse- and in some cases a better keyboard- are potential issues. That leaves you with one problem though: Controls. That also opens up for using them for computer gaming, and while you won’t be running the latest games with maximum settings, that’s frankly not needed to have a good time. The faster you can make tablets and laptops without sacrificing portability, the more like a true computer they become.
While the performance increases we’ve seen in the last year or so have been more in the “nice to have” category on most mobile device platforms, the one area where increases in performance has some actual use is for full fledged Windows devices.