Last Ray of Hope

The past couple of week’s I’ve really gotten into writing code that communicates with gaming devices (the Mac is limited in this part of itself).

One annoyance I had was with getting rumbling working on the XBox 360 pad, eventually after essentially pinging all messages, I found and worked out the format for the rumble message, which was annoyingly nothing like the others listed.

Well after that I got kinda bored with the 360 and decided to turn towards another console controller, the Wiimote. And I thought I’d write my own driver.

Long story short, when I was having trouble getting my driver working, I looked at the code for the driver for Tattiebogle’s XBox 360 pad driver, only to find out that it has redefined the rumble message to it’s own format, namely the 4 byte one, only to forward on the settings to the 360 pad.

Well I’m glad I figured out why the message was different, kinda annoying that wasn’t in his FAQ. Hopefully others will find this post and go “ohhhhhhhh” like I did when seeing the code.

As for the Wiimote, writing a driver for a Bluetooth device I’ve decided doesn’t make sense, the device is already designed to communicate with another bluetooth device, so I made a class instead, using a Bluetooth API and documentation I found on WiiBrew.

I’ll hopefully post my Xcode project for testing the 360 pad in a few days. And I’ll probably write up my Wiimote stuff once I get it working the way I want. I’m really tempted to buy lots of cheap USB and Bluetooth devices on eBay now just to see if I can write drivers for them.