I have installed the Risen game and can play with the mouse. I want to use an xbox 360 wireless controller. I bought the receiver and set it up as I can use it to control the computer in gamer controller/properties as seen in the image. However, when I try to use the controller with Risen it does not work. There appears to be nothing in Risen's settings to switch from mouse/keyboard to pc connected controller.

I am new to this gaming on a PC (once was an xbox360 guy) so I don't know if it is silly to expect that I can use the controller with GOG games or if I don't have something set up correctly etc.

Risen is an old game and uses a different API.

Older controllers and games use Dinput, newer games and the XBox controller use Xinput.

You have two options, either use an emulator (best option), or use profile software like Pinnacle or Xpadder to bind the controller keys to keyboard keys.

XBox 360CE emulator: EDIT: If you play a lot of older games, you can buy either a Dinput controller, or something like a Logitech F Series which has a switch and supports both APIs.

I think u wld be better off buying a controller that can use Dinput & supports older games. I also recommend the Logitech F series (currently only F310 & F710 available). Do note that the F310 is wired & has no vibration while F710 is wireless with vibration.

The first question to ask would be: Does Risen even support controllers? There is no mention of it on the game card. On consoles everything supports controllers since it's the only input method available. On PC this is not the case. There are many games that do not support controllers at all.

As Kleetus already said there are two ways to program controller support: DirectInput (which is used by most older games) and XInput (which is only a few years old). The controller/controller driver must support both methods if you want to play older and newer games that support controillers.

Sadly there are hardly any controllers that support both. As far as I know only the two Logitech controllers that were already mentioned do so.

Since you have a xbox 360 controller that only supports XInput you will either need a different controller for older games or emulation software. Kleetus was wrong about the software though. x360ce is for older controllers that only support DirectInput and translates DirectInput to XInput. What you need is the other way round and that can't be done with x360ce. I don't know of a software that does that though.

There is plenty of software though to map a controller to keyboard keys. Like JoyToKey or the Pinnacle Game Profiler. You can use one of these to map you controller to keys for older games.

I was and had it around the other way, thanks for the correction.

However, xinputplus can give you direct input out of your xinput controller.
https://sites.google.com/site/0dd14lab/xinput-plus
The site is in Japanese, as is the program, but there is an English Readme. It works great.

You can change the program to english with the tab in this image: https://sites.google.com/site/0dd14lab/_/rsrc/1361672720569/xinput-plus/xinputplus_othersettings.png

Never heard of it, looks great.

And I love the spelling of Japanease.

I had to use this to get my XBox controller working in Tomb Raider.