First post to the forum, and it's possible I have the wrong sub-forum here. Mods feel free to move to PC or Xbox gaming (or wherever).

Most Xbox 360 controllers work in Windows through the official MS driver. However, the "Big Button" Controllers do not. There are lots (maybe 6!) of people that would like to use these controllers for simple games running in windows.

I'm personally writing a trivia game and would like to use the controllers.

There’s apparently a working Linux driver out there:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/75871/
or
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/56784/

Also, here is the msdn thread where other people intested in these drivers are commiserating: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/ ... ageIndex=2

I'm willing to do some of the grunt work, I just don't know how to do it. If some geniuses here could give a brother a shove in the right direction, please do.

Thanks!

Would this be better off in another forum?

This isn't really a coding forums, this forum revolves more around hardware hacking and portablizing game consoles. For writing software drivers I have no idea where you'd go, although it is something I'd like to learn myself, so if you find any good resources please post them back here.

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, I'd gotten that impression- that coding or writing drivers was a little bit of a non discussion around here.

The problem with drivers is that software people see it as a hardware problem and hardware people see it as a software problem.

Apart from the few people around the 'net who just seem to know how to do it... I can't find a community of people who can help out someone as hopeless as myself.

I thought people here might have been writing custom drivers for their microcontroller projects and might be familiar enough with the process to shove me off in the right direction.

Maybe this thread will attract someone who knows or somone who knows someone who knows and we can take it from there.

P.S. It looks like I can't get to patchwork.kernel.org. It must be down. I have most of the code at home- I'll have to upload it somewhere so that when I finally get moving on this, someone else can actually look at the pre-existing Linux driver.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xna-bigbutton/files/

Success! If someone else ends up in a similar situation, I used LibUSB's generic USB driver and then wrote a C# class so that I could status it from .NET or XNA.