Coming up on Hands on Tech, let's take a look at using a PlayStation controller on our Windows machine.

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Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I'm Micah Sargent.

And as you know, this is the show where you ask your tech questions and I attempt to answer them. Today, our question comes in from David. David is written in to say this. I'm looking for using a PlayStation 3 controller on Windows 10 or 11 to use the flight simulator.

I did find a driver that emulates an Xbox controller, but some of the buttons don't work on my PS3 controller.

Is there a PS3 version so more buttons can work?

Well, first and foremost, David, good question, by the way.

It's kind of interesting because on the Mac OS side of

things, MacOS is very platform agnostic when it comes to controllers. So I have a dual sense controller

that I purchased that I can use on my Mac very easily. But the Mac also

supports an Xbox controller if you'd rather use that. And then also, let me grab it, it's kind of

tucked away back here. I also have this Luna controller from Amazon that also works with my Mac.

There's this really great system for being able to just use whatever controller you want to use on the Mac,

but the same doesn't quite apply on the Windows side.

And that's because Microsoft has, as you might imagine, establish the Xbox

controller as the standard game pad for Windows. Microsoft owns Xbox. Xbox is the controller

that is first and foremost. And so most games, and in particular, games that are from Microsoft

like Microsoft Flight Simulator,

are designed with X input.

And X input is the API that kind of does the controller translation between your device

and the game that you're playing.

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