After about a year of just reading posts, I felt that I should contribute to the community to kind of say thanks for all the good posts and reviews that I have read. I have been a long time gamer, got my NES when I was five back in 1988 and have been hooked on console and PC gaming ever since. I jump back and forth when playing newer and older games, the last game I beat was Phantasy Star 1 (Thanks RetroforceGO!), and now I am working on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I typically stick to RPGs, platformers, shmups, and RTSs. Furthermore I love playing under appreciated games for some reason that never took off in America (i.e. Valkyrie Profile (PS1 version) is probably one of my favorite games). I figure a good game is good regardless how old, how primitive the graphics, or how small the total file size of the game is.

As you can see the personal space is kind of under construction right now while I get the proper layout down, but I figured I would make my first post a quick review about a neat little program called Xpadder which basically maps game controller buttons to keyboards on PCs so you can use gamepads where gamepads are not natively supported. I have heard a few people complain about lack of gamepad support for demos or games so I figured I would help everyone by reviewing this program. So hopefully you enjoy!

Impressions of Xpadder

I often find with certain not emulators and older pc games the lack of useful gamepad support. Often beta versions of emulators or demos of games only support keyboard support, which makes it often uncomfortable to play the game as intended. Furthermore, some programs have unreliable gamepad support, so setting up a gamepad can sometimes be frustrating and time consuming. I remember a Chad Concelmo article about a fan remake of Metroid II and saying that playing the beta was at times uncomfortable due to the lack of gamepad support. I have had this problem a few times myself with various games, but luckily I found out about a neat little program called Xpadder.

To people who don’t know about it (which I hope is a lot because this review would be kind of pointless then), Xpadder is simply a middle man program that binds gamepad buttons (digital, analog, triggers, you name it) to various keyboard bindings. This then circumvents the issue of a game/emulator not having gamepad support. The program is free for personal use, and very easy to install and setup. So whenever you have Xpadder running and you press a gamepad button, it will be registered as a keyboard button instead. The main program can be downloaded here and comes in a small zip file. A good tutorial that I used to setup my controller can be found here.

When starting the program, Xpadder first searches for any gamepads connected to the PC. You then set up key bindings for each button on the controller. The Xpadder website also has a bunch of controller images so you can properly illustrate where each binding goes to on your gamepad (see image below). There are separate tabs in the configuration window that sets up analog sticks, d-pads, buttons, and triggers, and Xpadder will intelligently determine if you are properly binding all correct types of control buttons and mechanisms.



The image I show below is the keyboard bindings for my Logitech Dual Action gamepad. You can setup up multiple keybinding profiles for a controller as well as setup different bindings for other controllers too. From what it looks like you can actually bind four controller at once (hopefully you have enough keypad buttons to accommodate!) so you can play multiplayer games. I haven’t tried this yet since I only have one gamepad. However, I have been using Xpadder for about 2 months now and I have never had any problems with it. It always detects my controller with no problem, and never really has any conflicts with programs/emulators. The one thing you need to watch out for is accidently binding a button that a program uses to create a movie or saves the game. I had that happen when I first started using Xpadder and that was quite a disaster!



Anyways, hopefully you liked my initial impressions of the Xpadder gamepad binding program. I figured it was about time that I gave back to the community here for all the good months of reading useful reviews and other random tidbits. And if you did not like the review, just take a look at my avatar, a picture of my fat but lovable beagle, Brock Samson (yep that’s his name…it was that or “The Monarch”). You cannot hate that adorable face!

-Mike

P.S. Sorry for any grammar mistakes!