The games industry is no more limited to games played with the classical keyboard. I am sure that many of you must have broken a keyboard while playing an addictive game. To ease the gaming experience, hardware producers created the gamepad, a device that enables us to play out favorite games without using the keyboard but having all the needed buttons between our palms.
Though gamepads were invented long time ago and primary used for consoles, they evolved and now, they are available on the market in wireless versions.
This means you can play with no cable impediment. But wouldn't it be nice to use the wireless option in other situations than gameplay? What if you and your girlfriend are watching a movie on your PC and every time you need to pause/play the movie you need to get up from your bed, go to the PC desk and do the operation? Annoying I can say.
Well, if it happens to have a wireless gamepad in the room, take advantage of its features and configure it to act like a mouse. I know, it does not have such option but other programmers thought it is very useful so they designed some little configurable applications that can emulate the mouse movements and clicks through a gamepad or a joystick. I have searched the huge Softpedia software database and I have extracted some gamepad related software that will help you a lot.
Install, Calibrate, TestFist of all, you have to be sure that your gamepad driver is installed properly. After the driver installation, go to Control Panel and access Game Controllers icon. Check the list to see whether the gamepad/joystick is recognized by the system or not. If your model is displayed in the list, it means that the driver installation was successful and now you can test your device.
Click on the Test tab under the Properties window and try all the movements and buttons to see if your device is acting normal. In case the device is not responding correctly, in the Game Controllers window click Properties -> Settings -> Calibrate. Follow the wizard instructions to calibrate your device. To be sure that you have calibrated the gamepad well, run the test again.
To teach the computer that another controller is active and ready to use (by default, Windows recognizes the mouse as controller for cursor moves and clicks) we need to install a special designed application that will do this job. I will present you with two such applications, one simple and one more complex:
The transformation processJmouse is one of the simplest applications designed to let you control your cursor on the screen using an alternative device than the mouse and keyboard. With no installation required, just an archive extraction, it will run immediately eating just 3,080 K of memory. The configuration is very simple permitting you to map the mouse clicks using the buttons of the gamepad. Very simple to use! It will place a joystick icon in the system tray notifying you that it is active. Notice that when you emulate the mouse functions, the mouse device will still work. When you want to cut off the mouse emulation just exit the program and you are done.
Another similar application but a little more complex is
Joystick 2 Mouse. It offers the same features to emulate mouse movements and clicks but with more settings than the previous application. The most important option besides the emulation is mapping for different controls of applications like Winamp or Internet Explorer. Using a wireless gamepad along with this application, you can get yourself an improvised but useful remote control. Enjoy!
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