I'm looking to buy a wireless gamepad. I could use some recommendations and experiences people have had using their gamepad on a Mac using Wine. I was looking at Xbox and PS3 controllers but I'm leaning towards a PS3 controller. There are a couple reasons for this:

1. OS X has native support for PS3
2. It uses bluetooth. I already have a USB dongle for wireless mouse and keyboard. Would prefer not to use my second USB port for another one (I use a laptop).

How well does the PS3 controller work in Windows games under Wine? Any computer gamepads which I should take a look at?

I guess I should have read this thread recently posted about gamepads: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/best_pc_gamepad_controller/page1

Though I'll still take any Mac user experiences with various controllers.

Actually, I saved this thread as a favorite because I am interested in what response you may get as pertains to a gamepad with a game running via Wine on a Mac. I thought I read someplace there is no X-Input support in Wine so an Xbox controller would not work but maybe I am wrong?

Hopefully DirectInput works. My Logitech F-510 supports both standards. You can switch between them as desired.

It would be cool if the PS3 controller worked. I'd like to get one of those where as you say there is native OS X support for them and they are very good quality.

I don't have a Mac, but... I have a usb gamepad and Wine (on Ubuntu) picks it up automatically.

Is it X-Input (Xbox 360 compatible)? or DirectInput? Do you know? What kind of controller is it?

Thanks. Well, I guess I will find out for sure the first time I try something I want a gamepad for with Wine. For now, I'm rebooting into Windows for stuff I use one with or else running it in a virtual machine. I played the original Flatout racing game in a Windows XP virtual machine and it worked great with my game pad there.

I too would be interested in gamepads that work on a Mac/Wine.

I did some searching and a lot of information I found was old, so not sure how it applies to the current Wine version. But it seems xinput is not officially supported. I'm not sure if its being worked on or not. Someone made a patch to add some xinput support if you want to get involved with building a custom version, though its not a full implementation: http://grumbel.blogspot.com/2010/08/xinput-support-in-wine.html

From what I read, it does seem some of the xinput emulators for Windows can be used under Wine which could be used as a workaround.

A friend of mine has a PS3. Forget if he has an extra controller, but I'll see if I can borrow it and test it out before buying.

The Logitech F-series looks like a good alternative if things don't go well. I could probably live without wireless if the cord is long enough.

I'd be interested in hearing how you make out with the PS3 controller and something in Wine.

It's too bad there seems to be some division between the leading porting companies, Feral and Aspyr, on which standard they support for controllers. From what I understand with Aspyr titles an Xbox controller just works without any special driver needed. For Feral titles which support lots of different controllers, you need a driver to use an Xbox controller but this conflicts with how Aspyr does things so basically you are stuck needing to install and remove a driver when changing between Aspyr and Feral games if the controller is an Xbox one. I don't know if Aspyr games support the PS3 controller or not.

This is why a Logitech works out well since you can just switch it between xinput and directinput on the fly as needed. Of course, if Aspyr supports the PS3 controller too and it works with Wine, that would be ideal as I expect it is a higher quality controller and it is wireless.

If I remember correctly, when I was looking into the usb gamepad support on Wine, a lot of the documentations are outdated. The last one I saw just simply said, it should be stable enough to auto-detect, so I did it. I have one old N64-converted to USB controller that is DirectInput based and that worked just fine. I bought a new cheapy dual analog and that mostly works too without fiddling. That is the extent of my experience with it. I remember the old Wine days when it would just ignore controllers, but it seems better these days.

I'll be borrowing the ps3 controller this weekend. I'll let you know the results.

Thanks. Hope it works well.

I don't know anything about Mac/Wine, but perhaps some of the same issues apply as do to Linux/Wine, so I'll state what I know after having spent a lot of effort to play windows games through wine using a wired X-Box 360 controller.

First of all, the gamepad needs to be supported in the operating system, since wine has no hardware support of its own. For Linux there are two drivers; the inflexible in-kernel xpad.ko which probably loads automatically on plugging it in unless you've blacklisted it, and the much more flexible userspace driver xboxdrv. I use the latter, because it can remap the axes and buttons as one pleases, can output keyboard and mouse events, emulate square axis .. present triggers as buttons instead of axes .. you name it. Perhaps there is something similar for Mac?

Wine builds a DirectInput device for the game on top of what the operating system provides it with. I'm not entirely sure what logic it uses to determine which axes are for what. By default the right stick tends to become (Rx,Ry), and that turns out to be fairly useless with most of everything that I've tried. It can be remapped to the often-more-useful (Z,Rz) by either xboxdrv, or through the wine registry. Running "wine control joy.cpl" and choosing the "Test Joystick" tab lets you see how the axis and buttons are shown to games through wine.

The triggers are often a problem. By default they are separate axes in the Linux drivers, but the Windows DirectInput driver combines them to a single Z axis that averages them. xboxdrv can do this, but it's not actually not very good for anything except maybe for car games, so it's often more useful to have them as buttons.

There is, I believe, still no XInput interface in wine, and that's what all the new games with gamepad support expect. I have used with good results the x360ce windows software to provide XInput on top of DirectInput; this consists of simply dropping into the game a custom xinput1_3.dll and a x360ce.ini custom-made to match the xboxdrv configuration. So in the end there are three layers of mappings (xboxdrv -> wine -> x360ce) making it fairly complex, but it does work.

Hope some of this is of use.

First, the good news:

I successfully got the Dualshock 3 controller working through bluetooth. At first it didn't seem like it was working as it wasn't pairing. Most of the instructions I found on the internet says a box will come up requesting the passcode but this wasn't happening for me. Turns out the pairing isn't needed. Basically I just had to turn bluetooth on, press the "Playstation" button on the controller and my Macbook connected and recognized it as a PS3 controller. The LEDs on the controller continue to flash like it is trying to connect which can get annoying. To get the LEDs to stop flashing, I followed the steps mentioned in this post: https://discussions.apple.com/message/20177064#20177064

I tested the controller with two native Mac programs: Cave Story and SNES9x. No problems once I configured the controls.

I tested the controller with Tyrian 2000 and Death Rally using Boxer. Again, worked fine.

Now the not-so-great news:

The controller does work in games which support DirectInput in Wine. My test game was Rogue Legacy. Turning DirectInput support on in the options allows the controller to work, but not in the way you will want it to. I wanted to map Jump to the X button and Attack to the Square button. Unfortunately the face buttons are not recognized. You would have to map these to the shoulder or other buttons. I confirmed the same with Shadow Man, the face buttons cannot be mapped (the analog stick does work btw).

This seems to be an issue not with Wine but with the way OSX handles the PS3 buttons & the Windows games themselves. The four face buttons are mapped to buttons 12-15. I'm guessing the games are not programmed to recognize such high-number buttons. I downloaded the free version of Xpadder and ran it with Wine and it correctly showed that buttons 12-15 were being pressed when I pressed the face buttons. So all button information is being properly passed into Wine, which is why I'm guessing the games are just not programmed to look for those buttons.

I'm thinking a program like Controller Mate might be able to get around this if it can be used to remap the buttons (say make button 12 register as button 4, etc). I downloaded the program but it is fairly complicated and I couldn't do a quick test with it. Will have to read the instructions and play around with it.

Thanks for the info! I tried running the wine joystick control panel but wasn't able to. I'm using a pre-built wine (1.5.23) via PlayOnMac so this might be why. Running "wine control joy.cpl" doesn't actually open anything and "wine control" just opens a control panel with "add/remove programs" and "internet settings". I've been thinking of building my own now that it has a Mac driver. The PlayOnMac builds still use the X11 driver.

EDIT: Forget about Controller Mate. It can't output controller button presses, only keystrokes and mouse. Of course I could use it to map the buttons to keys and just set Rogue Legacy to use the keyboard.