Mouse/"keyboard" designed for Xbox (1 Viewer)

[Dave Falasco]

Saw something interesting on TeamXbox this morning--a company called Ferraro Design has come up with a prototype mouse/"keyboard" interface for the Xbox. Their peripheral will allow a standard MS USB mouse to be connected, along with a weird thing called "The Claw" that kind of defies description. It sure doesn't look like any keyboard I've ever seen...
Check it out here!

 

[BrianB]

This is already available for the PC.

 

[Dave Falasco]

I didn't realize that, Brian. I just thought it was interesting because one of the complaints I used to read a lot about Halo was that there was no mouse/keyboard support for it. (Although people seemed to get used to the controller pretty quickly once they played it). And MS seemed pretty adamant that no mouse/keyboard peripheral would ever show up on the 'box, probably to distance themselves from the "PC Lite" image they were fighting early on. I'm not a big keyboard/mouse guy myself, but a lot of FPS fans are, and with Halo already out and the Xbox Live version of Unreal coming, I imagine this news is welcome to the old-school PC FPS crowd.

 

[Michael St. Clair]

Do any games have hooks in the code to actually use this stuff?

 

[John M Miller]

I'm assuming that the mouse is just the right thumbstick and "the claw" controls all the other functions.

 

[Joe michaels]

I didn't think that HALO itself could support a Mouse?

 

[Michael St. Clair]

I'm assuming that the mouse is just the right thumbstick and "the claw" controls all the other functions.

Converting positional analog control (mouse) to directional analog control (joystick) is non-trivial. It will be interesting to see if this is the case. If so, I bet it sucks.