ViciousXUSMC's Technology Database

I have a new laptop and so that means time for a new product review!

This review and laptop model are both very popular.

For now you can view the full review over on notebookreview.com by clicking  HERE

So I decided to get one of these for testing. I was very skeptical about just how well it would work and if it was needed for anything. I already knew how to use the classic controller via bluetooth but the idea of plug & play and 2 players is what got me.

Is it really just plug & play?

Does it really work with 2 players?

Read on and find out!

Introduction:

So what is it? – Its a simple USB adapter with input for [U]two[/U] Wii classic controllers to use them as gamepads in Windows (XP, Vista, 7)

As I am sure you know the Wii classic controler is ideal for certain types of gaming, its very close in resemblance to the old Super Nintendo controllers. The adapter also works with the Pro version classic controllers but I have none to test.

So lets break this down for review.

Build Quality & Design:

The unit is small, its about 3/5ths the size of a Wii classic controller, made from a solid case of plastic and doesn’t seem like it would break easy. The cable going from the unit is of good quality and so is the usb header that plugs into your computer.

Four small philips screws keep it closed so that means you can open it to see whats inside

The insert points for the classic controller work well and I dont see them breaking easy but its a not a smooth “glide” like when you connect them to a wiimote, its got a rougher feel to it.

The USB cable is about 6ft long to compensate for the short length of cable the classic controller has and the unit itself is incredibly light.

Performance:

It did just like it was supposed to, it was plug & play. Just plug a controller into the adapter and then plug it into a usb port. Right away windows picked up and installed the standard drivers for a HID gamepad device. Every single button works even the home button and center shoulder buttons giving you a great number of buttons to use.

Here is the real kicker, both analog sticks work as full analog.

If you were like me and previously using a classic controller via bluetooth and hacking this was where that method fell short. The only way to get analog control was with a old old program called PPJoy and its an old 16bit program so it did not work under any 64bit operating systems. But now here it is plug & play full analog support for $16 on a 64bit operating system.

The hacking way sill has its merits though, use of the actual wiimote & the nunchuck, and of course its wireless.

So with one controller working so well I figured maybe I will find problems when using 2 pads at once, maybe it just duplicates the input of the first controller, it was logical to think this since its the first time I would ever use 2 controllers via just one usb cable.

Plug in a 2nd controller, and “beep” a new HID device installs. Sure enough check the Windows Device Manager and I see three devices listed. A usb controller (the adapter) and two HID devices (the two classic controllers)

Here is what my Windows Devices settings looks like:

From Mayflash Wii Classic Controller Adapter

The 2nd controller had every button working and both analog sticks fully functional.

I used it briefly for some 2 player SNES emulation and it was flawless, as close to holding and using a SNES controller I have had in many years.

I have not tried yet but with the fully functional axis this should also make a very good stand in N64 controller as well.

It actually gets better now. The device comes with a drivers disk… I didnt think you needed it for anything but I did read the device details and it said it has “programmable buttons” so figured why not install this software/driver and see what happens.

A very fast install from a mini disk later and now my properties tab in the Windows gamepad area suddenly transformed into a full fledged gamepad setup window.

From Mayflash Wii Classic Controller Adapter

Within this new control panel you can manually select what each button will be on the controller. Meaning if button A = Button 1 you can make it Button 5. This may come in handy for a game that accepts a limited range of joystick buttons. You can also change the X/Y axis around but not invert them.

The real star of the show here is that you can configure both the Dpad input method & the analog shoulder buttons as well as add auto fire.

The Dpad can be set in 3 ways, it can be a regular standard HAT, or it can be turned into button inputs instead, or it can be used as a digital analog stick. This pretty much means compatibility with any game or program.

From Mayflash Wii Classic Controller Adapter

The two shoulder buttons can be set to be sliders (analog) digital (buttons), or both.

From Mayflash Wii Classic Controller Adapter

In both mode its an analog axis but when fully pressed it activates a digital button, pretty neat.

The auto fire is turned on/off for each button you choose and you can also use a slider to determine the speed of auto fire.

From Mayflash Wii Classic Controller Adapter

So what can I say? I am really impressed. I did not expect anything nearly this elaborate or customizable from some cheap adapter out of China.

Value for price paid:

Pretty good Mayflash does not sell there own products directly but via 3rd party mostly on ebay. I was able to find them for $16.00 with free shipping. This is a aggressive price and part of why I was so skeptical of the product.

The total cost to you is higher if you actually have to buy a classic controller as well, but if you have one or two already because you have a wii then this is a cheap way to upgrade those controllers to have a lot more use.

But I can tell you know the product works and was worth every penny.

Conclusion:

Have a Wii? Like emulation on your PC? Get it! This could be a very good alternative to the Xbox 360 controller too I would think as it has everything the 360 has + 1 more button.

I would recommend this as the #1 way to play emulation right now, but only #2 for PC games. The Xbox360 controller is tailored to work on PC and many games for windows titles have profiles set for that controller already. (you can download a controller emulator to fool those games into thinking your using a 360 controller though….)

The only flaw I see with this device is not the device itself, but the classic controllers, having the cable come out of the bottom of the controller is not very good feeling in my hands. Its designed that way because you would normally have the wiimote in your lap. You can remedy this by getting a classic controller pro though it has the cable out the top side, and also adds the 2nd shoulder buttons and the grips.

Hope the review was a good read for you guys, feel free to comment and stuff.

Also here are the drivers for the device I uploaded them incase you ever lose your drivers disk. I could not locate them on the Mayflash site and its a mini disk, I know not every person has a computer that likes to read those small disks.

Download Drivers: HERE

I am not the largest Left 4 Dead fan, its a good game concept but seems to get old fast. I feel the 2nd game is way better than the first but not enough has changed to revive the game and give it a whole new replay value. It has good Eyefinity support but the worst part about L4D2 is that its (IMO) near pointless to play single player and online your at the mercy of finding a good team if your to enjoy it. If you have good friends to play with, this game is awesome. If your like me and just play with random people very few games end up being worth playing.

This day I took these two videos I ran into some really cool guys and this ended up being my most favorite gaming session on L4D2 so far.

Here is the first of many HD gameplay videos taken with the new setup.  Eyefinity is just the technology of making multiple monitors into one.  What this means for gaming is new ultra wide FOV (field of view) for games that support it.

Serious Sam HD is a $20 game on Steam that supports up to 16 players co-op and has new modes promised like deathmatch soon.

My gameplay resolution is 5760×1200, I record it at half that using FRAPS so 2880×600 I then splice the multiple FRAPS clips into one using AVISynth and resize to 1920×400.  That new file is then encoded with very high settings using H246 for video and AAC for audio.

I then upload it to youtube and this is what you get:

I would let these preload for a bit so they do not pause or stop while playing to load.

If you would like to see the quality of one of my 1920×400 files before youtube butchers it download it HERE.

I am going to have a field day posting up some pictures and videos of the new ATI Eyefinity technology.  I just recently got myself a ATI 5870 card and 3x Dell U2410 24″ 1920×1200 monitors.  So been playing games in a very awesome 5760×1200 resolution.  You have to see it in person to really understand how cool it is.

Most people these days have a digital life. Like your music, movies, pictures, games, and all other data. All that stuff that is on your computer.

Its important to you and you do not want to lose it. Also wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get to it at any time from anywhere? Example, Say you visit some out of town family you would be able to show them the pictures of your vacation from there home computer just by logging into your own personal server. That is a lot easier than printing out pictures, or e-mailing them.

Well those are the 2 main goals of having a WHS, its a nice user friendly system that specializes in automatically backing up your data from your computers, and also making it available to you online when your away from home.

Really that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what a WHS can do though.

A WHS can host a website/blog (I plan to host this site from mine when I build it), you can stream music/movies to your media extenders or other computer, It can even completely restore a computer for you if say your hard drive dies on your laptop, put a new hard drive in the laptop and use the WHS rescue boot disk and in no time your laptop will be exactly like it was again with all programs installed and all your data as if nothing ever happened. Best yet the server itself can protect its own data as long as you have more than one hard drive installed into it, so that if a drive dies you do not lose any of the data.

There are quite a few pre-built systems out there, the most popular being the HP Media Smart Server but as usual with the right know-how and skills you can build your own for cheaper and it will be more powerful.

Check out my shopping list of parts HERE

My current budget for this build is $0.00 this project has been on hold for budget reasons for well over a year, but I am hoping to find a way to start saving for it now and order the base parts while they are on sale. If you would like to help any site donations are going to this project. Since the server will host this site its still being donated to the site.

Once it is completed look forward to my WHS review and a nice list of my favorite plug-in’s and cool things you can do.

If you just got the game and noticed some lag in the online matches there is a very good chance its due to the games default setting of variable frame rate. You want your game and your opponents game to sync up so that one computer does not slow down to match the other.

To resolve this go into the game options and turn on Fixed Frame Rate. If you and your opponent do this it should fix the lag unless there is another issue in play like a bad internet connection.

Here is a little explanation of the problem from the SF4 forums.

Hopefully Capcom will patch the game to force fixed frame rate when gaming online, till then try to spread the word to everybody you know to turn it on.

Game on people, I’ll get online to play for the first time later today!

So while I was messing around with the infinity evolution points hack I decided to see if I could figure out infinity HP, and I did!

I cant really give an easy tutorial on how to do this one, the value is hard to find and it changes every time you play the game, but I think I may know how to make a program (trainer) to do the hard work for you. Will post back with updates on that.

For now check out the video!

Watch the HD Version HERE (Much higher quality, let it load for a bit before playing)

There actually is no cheat code in Prototype for infinity points or all upgrades, I am going to show you today how to cheat games that do not have cheat codes

I got bored point farming so I took the fast track to getting myself all the upgrades and I was nice enough to take the time to put together a very easy step by step guide on how I did it, so that you can do it also.

See the full guide HERE

The recent release of SF4 for the PC has gone well for most but there is a large crowd of people very displeased with the lack of keyboard support for 2 players.
If you think “thats not a big deal who would play with a keyboard and 2 people?”, then you don’t know about the home built arcade scene.

Many people build there own full blown authentic arcade cabinets at home, the vast majority of these use a hacked keyboard or a keyboard encoder to send the joystick & button signals to the computer. As emulators and things use keyboard input. Now with the lack of 2 player keyboard these people have a game they cant play on there arcade cabinets unless its 1 player only.

Currently the work arounds are: Use PPjoy a virtual joystick emulator to fool the game into thinking you have a gamepad but this method is complicated and does not work in a 64bit OS (So I cant use it), or be lucky enough to have a joystick or encoder that is used as a windows gamepad instead of a keyboard. (Perfect 360 Joystick or Cthulhu board)

Im not lucky enough to be able to use PPjoy as I use a 64bit OS, but I am lucky enough to have two Cthulhu boards that I used to hook my home made arcade into my Wii, so I will post back the results of making the adapter cables needed to hook it to my PC for some 2 player SF4 action.