Mouse and Keyboard for XBox 360?

Question

I know there are third party attachments you can get like the XFPS Sniper or the Mayflash Max. So two questions really.

1: Has Microsoft given a reason why they decided not to allow the use of a mouse on the XBox?

2: Do the XFPS Sniper or Mayflash Max really work? I have heard there are some latency issues.

Answer

I had to take some time to look this up (and plug things into my xbox) and I learned the following:

• The Xbox 360 will accept keyboard and mouse input (I'm actually guessing on the mouse as it didn't do anything, but the 360 didn't complain).
• This input is different in nature than the controller (thus you can't use it to play Halo for example)
• You can use this to type into the Xbox Dashboard in any Text Input field.

I dug deeper into the XNA api and found the following:

• The XNA Keyboard class provides different Enum from the Xbox controller
• There is no explicit cast between the two (though a developer could write one)
• The Keyboard and Controller are polled differently (so a developer must poll it separately from the Controller)
• Because of the previous point, there is no built in way to associate a keyboard hooked into the 360 with an account without explicitly doing so (ie. the api doesn't handle this for you).

I hope this helps.

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