Xpadder

Play games with all the convenience of a Playstation or Xbox controller!

Let's face it: sometimes playing PC games hunched over the keyboard typing in commands is hard work, straining players' backs and eyes after prolonged use. In particular platform based and first person shooter games often seem so much easier to play on the Playstation, Xbox and Wii. Xpadder, developed by Jonathan Firth offers an ideal solution to PC games with little or no game pad support.

The Xpadder emulates a mouse and keyboard with the buttons and directional thumb pad of the game controller. It enables playing under multiple profiles, rumbled feedback and a chorded input level, which all combine to emulate mouse or laptop touchpad movement. It is necessary to manually configure the game pad with the keyboard controls, but this is rendered extremely user friendly by the configuration screens which make it a straightforward process to assign particular keyboard functions to the different buttons on the gamepad. The controller can even be used like a remote on software like the PC or laptop's video player or a windows compatible web browser.

Xpadder does not require a complicated installation process, it can be installed directly from a zip file. Free trial versions are still available online, though the most up to date iteration is no longer free, the enhanced gaming experience it delivers makes the purchase worthwhile. It enables PC gamers to enjoy the same fun as console players in inviting fellow gamers to their living room or bedroom to play multiplayer, as Xpadder can support multiple and different controllers at the same time. This may be appealing to parents of preteen and adolescent gamers, who may not be mature enough to play online against anonymous strangers. Instead the young PC gamer can invite his or her "real life" friends over and use their console controllers to play PC games under the same roof and parental supervision. The Xpadder can support up to 16 controllers and is compatible all Windows systems from the early 2000s XP onward.

There are numerous support forums online incase a user has questions of a technical nature, including the specifics of modifying it for the new Windows 10 operating system. All in all, the program is worth the modest purchase price for the convenience and enhanced gaming experience it delivers.

Xpadder is a Windows program that lets you use gamepads with games that don’t support them.

Ideally, games on Windows have built-in support for gamepads, which use device drivers to communicate. Although increasingly less common, some games simply don’t offer that and instead only support input via a keyboard and/or mouse. This is where Xpadder comes in. It interfaces with the gamepad and translates the actions into actions that the game expects via keyboard and mouse emulation. Therefore, Xpadder should work with any game that supports KB/M controls.

Xpadder is a lightweight and portable program, which means it requires few resources and doesn’t require installation. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be unzipped, and any profiles you create are simply carried around in that archive. It may be necessary for you to configure Xpadder for a particular game controller. However, the program includes a large library of known gamepads and will preconfigure yours if recognized. This helps avoid basic configuration.

Xpadder also allows you to create profiles. This way, you can have unique profiles for particular games, even have multiple profiles on games that you can swap to on the fly and have multiple profiles for different users who share a computer. Profile management is quite sophisticated and profiles are shareable, which means that you can share yours and download profiles others have created.

Profiles support advanced tuning options, including force feedback, which is often called rumble. Xpadder also supports multiple active devices and profiles. That means that you can have two or more active gamepads, and you can even use Xpadder for local multiplayer environments.

Xpadder can also extend functionality to DOS games, emulated games and browser and other Internet games. In addition, use of Xpadder isn’t limited to just games. You can use it to control a web browser or just about any program that supports mouse and keyboard. You can also bind gamepad buttons to shortcuts. This allows you to lower or raise music volume while playing a game for instance.

The user interface is effective but does seems somewhat outdated by current standards. Fortunately, you only interact with it during controller configuration. Another issue, albeit an uncommon one, is that some gamepads are simply incompatible, and if you have one of these gamepads, there’s nothing you can do to get it to work with Xpadder.