Maximus XIM: Playing Xbox 360 With A Mouse And Keyboard Part Deux

So after I tried out the MaxShooter, I decided I wanted to give an Xbox Input Machine (XIM) a fair try. I sold the MaxShooter on Ebay and picked up a Maximus XIM. The Maximus XIM is a first generation XIM modified to work for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Their are a few differences between a XIM and the MaxShooter or an XFPS type adapter:

• The XIM requires a computer running software, and uses the computer's keyboard and mouse for input.
• XIM software helps account for the "dead space" I talked about with the MaxShooter.
• The Maximus XIM does not plug directly into the Xbox 360, rather it plugs into a Playstation 2 port. A PS3/Xbox to PS2 adapter is required.
• Bot still require a wired Xbox 360 controller.

So after owning this for a few weeks, I've learned a lot. The first thing you should know, is this is a really expensive solution. The XIM itself can cost upwards of $250. The wired controller will run you another $35, then you'll probably want to make sure you have a gaming mouse with adjustable DPI ($40-$70), and of course there's the cost of a computer if you don't have one.

As for computer specs necessary: There really isn't a set of hardware requirements, PC-wise for the XIM software. It's got to be a Windows-based PC, and that's pretty much it. I've learned that there are some fine points to computer selection though. Initially, I was running my XIM off of my wife's netbook. The XIM worked, and it was pretty smooth, much better than the MaxShooter. However, it was still a little laggy at times, and not super responsive for fine movements and long range aiming.

After a took a little break from using it, I moved the XIM downstairs to my other Xbox 360 (everyone has two, right?) which is hooked up to the same 25" 1080p monitor my PC is. That way I can hook it up between that 360 an my desktop which is an older Intel quad core Q6600 with 6GB of ram. (I know, it's time for an upgrade!). Suffice to say my desktop is much more beefy than the little Atom powered netbook with 2GB of ram. The results of hooking the XIM up to a faster machine were shocking. The XIM performed twice as well on my desktop and control in-game was much more fine-grained and responsive.

While my initial impressions of the XIM with the netbook were so-so: It worked well, but it was still just about as accurate as a thumbstick, maybe only a littler better, and it didn't seem to improve my game at all. My impressions of the XIM when it was hooked up to my PC were night-and-day different: The control offered by the XIM absolutely made a difference in my gaming. My accuracy jumped by about 7% (that's big really: 11% to 18%), and I could, without fear take a stand against two or three assaulting opponents at the same time, shooting each one before any one of them could hone a bead on me. I played the two best games I've ever played on COD: Black Ops thanks to the XIM. Getting a record of 41 kills in a single round and a record 17 kills in a row in another game where I went 23 and 1. Prior to the XIM, my best record was 21 kills in a round and 9 kills in a row. I'm not a very good player to begin with, and I'm still not, there are definitely better. If someone is good at a game and they have thumbsticks, they are still likely to beat you because they're probably using better strategy. However, if someone with thumbsticks meets someone with a mouse head-on (i.e. not from behind) the person with the thumbsticks is going to die unless he gets terribly lucky. I mean, I admittedly suck in comparison to your average gamer and I don't even flinch when I'm facing the other team's top killer in a virtual showdown. Unless I'm busy scratching something, I'm going to aim faster and there's not much he can do about it.

Added bonus with the XIM over other solutions: Programmers like myself (or even hobbiests) can use tools like AutoHotKey or even .NET to create very complex macros to be run in-game. A chain of moves for example, or a simple set of commands that you have to do repeatedly can be done in a single key stroke.

ILSpy - Free Open Source .NET Reflector Replacement

Since RedGate announced they are no longer going to offer .NET Reflector for free. I figured it wouldn't take long for someone to develop a new open source Reflector alternative. I would've thought it was funnier if that alternative was developed by Lutz Roeder himself, but whatever, it's free. ILSpy by Christoph Wille is bound to be a bit popular.

I haven't tried it yet, but that doesn't matter, it's free. As opposed to ... not.. free...  So yeah.

[EDIT] A coworker is telling me over the cube wall that he already likes it better than Reflector. Apparently it has better search functionality.

Too bad, so sad, RedGate. Better luck next time.

ILSpy downloads here

Mayflash Max Shooter Review: Playing Xbox 360 With A Mouse And Keyboard

• This is not going to be anything like playing on a PC. Ever. It works differently.
• It's still easier to aim quickly at medium distance with a mouse.
• It's easier to aim at extremely short and extremely long distances with the controller.
• It's not going to improve your game if your strategy is still shitty, like mine, you'll still suck, like me. Rushing into fire and getting killed is the same with every method of controlling your character.
• It's a fun and acquired taste. Precision snobs will hate it, but after getting over it's failings, I still like it a little better than the controller.
• The wires really junk up your playing area.
• Even though the Max Shooter is the cheapest solution, it's expensive ($70 - $100) once you include the cost of the Wired controller.

Okay, I've fantasized about doing this for years now, pretty much since I played Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox; But I never really looked into actually trying it until recently. So, I'll admit, I'm a little late to the game here.  It turns out since 2008 (or maybe earlier) there have been a few options for gamers that want to play FPS's on their 360s with a keyboard and mouse: There is the XIM360 and XIM2, probably the most famous, and certainly the most expensive (priced from $150 - $250), which connects to a PC to control the mouse and keyboard mapping; There is the XFPS Sniper 3 ($80-$100) which is a standalone that connects only to your 360 and your mouse and keyboard (and also allows for a PS2 controller to be connected); There is the XFPS 4 Speed ($100-$130), which similar to XIM connects to a PC; and finally there is the Mayflash Max Shooter ($50-$90), which is really just an XFPS Sniper 3 clone.  The article will focus on the Mayflash Max Shooter.

I purchased the Max Shooter from Gamebaz.com for $65 total, whom I can't really endorse as it took a really really long time to get my product in the mail. This is mostly because it shipped from Hong Kong, but whatever, it took a month. If you want to get one, I'd get one off of Amazon. It'll ship faster.

The setup: All of the systems mentioned above require an Xbox 360 Wired Controller. Not a wireless controller with a Play & Charge
. This is because the systems pass the controller authentication request sent by the Xbox through to the real Xbox controller, which then sends the response back to the 360 saying "it's all good, I'm a real controller". Then the fun starts. Once this occurs, you simply plug in your mouse and keyboard.

But you're not ready yet. This thing requires a good amount of setup. A lot of fiddling in fact. To this point, I have yet to custom program my Max Shooter, I've had to use the default bindings, which are less than great. If I ever figure out how to program this thing (the instructions didn't help a bit) I'll be sure to post it here. Getting the mouse to a tolerable level requires going into whatever game you're playing, adjusting the sensitivity (probably to something higher than you'd play with a controller), then fiddling with the X and Y axis wheels on the side while in game to get it to where you want it.

So how does it perform? If you're looking for a spot-on PC experience, this will never work like that, I doubt an all-hardware standalone keyboard/mouse adapter ever will, you need a PC or something that runs software, and here's why: All 360 games, particularly shooters have a "dead zone" in the analog stick. This is a distance you can push the stick without moving your character. This is to prevent accidentally twitching your guy off a cliff or something, and really is just making up for how inaccurate an analog thumb stick can be by nature. This device (and all others like it) is sampling your mouse movements, then calculating a speed vector (i.e. how far did this mouse move and in what direction in what time frame). It's then translating that vector to an analog stick command. All of this means that if you move your mouse very slowly in any direction, it will not translate to any movement at all in-game, because a slow movement means a small vector which means a small amount of movement on the analog stick, which as we've mentioned has a dead zone.  The reason the XIM2 and XIM360 work better is they use software installed on the PC to account and adjust for this deadzone.

My thoughts on it: At first I was pissed and disappointed. This was because I was looking for a perfect PC type experience. What I realized after fiddling with it is it's just not ever going to be like that. It's a bit jerky, a little laggy, and you can't fine tune it enough to get perfect aim like you would with a mouse on a PC.

After I used it for a while in Call of Duty: Black Ops, I got angry and said, screw it I'll just use the controller.  And when I picked up the controller I noticed something. While it's easier to hone-in on a far away target with the controller's analog sticks and some practice, it wasn't as easy to quickly acquire the target. Meaning, at medium range, shooting at someone with the Max Shooter and a mouse was much more intuitive even if it was jittery. I immediately switched back to the mouse and keyboard and kept practicing, and within an hour I was starting to get more and more killstreaks and much better kill to death ratios. I'm a sucky player, and I still sucked, but I sucked with (slightly) better aim and it did show.

This was fun, but I will be trying to get a XIM in the future, as they should perform much better.

Skynet Is One Step Closer To Kicking Humanity's Ass... At Jeopardy (IBM's Watson vs Humankind's Jeopardy Stars)

Okay, I'm not sure how I should take this. Should I be impressed at the technology? Should I be worried about being replaced by robots? Or should I think it's stupid someone wasted time making this awesome machine play Jeopardy?

Here's one thing I do know, it's not really playing Jeopardy the same way it's opponents are: It's almost certainly being fed plain text answers for it to search for it's questions (not to be confusing, but as you know Jeopardy is in reverse order here). This is because voice recognition is next to impossible. Notice how the website describing DeepQA, the project implemented in Watson in order to participate in Jeopardy, skirts the issue of voice recognition by pretending it doesn't exist, and instead uses clever wording like "natural language". Meaning if you type "How many flames am I gonna get after this here blog post thingy?" it will answer correctly, but if you said it aloud... probably not so much.

In the end, it will be interesting to see if Ken Jennings, and some other dude who would get his ass kicked by Ken anyhow, will triumph over a search engine that can't recognize speech. I'm kidding, I know who Brad Rutter is, but I'm totally on Team Jennings (what team are you on?)

This is sort of cool, and sort of impressive, I guess. But when I really think about it, the most human-like thing Watson is doing here is the computer equivalent of a Stupid Human Trick... a Stupid Computer Trick if you will.

I'm just hoping that after this publicity stunt they move on to something more relevant to computing and enter Watson in an MMA bout with Randy Couture.

Yamaha Silent Cinema and Audio Technica ATH-AD700 Headphones: A Laymen's Review

Before you read too far into this, I need to clarify something: I am an audio neophyte.  A quick tale of my audio-related technical prowess is as follows: I owned a surround sound receiver for three years before I knew I had to hook it up via optical cables (or some other digital audio input) in order to actually get surround sound.

I started looking into surround sound headsets to use with my Xbox 360.  Most of these headsets were standalone and had mixed reviews. They all had their own mixer/amp that needed it's own power supply, and they were all around $150 or more. In the process of researching these true surround headsets I somehow stumbled across what "Silent Cinema" meant on my Yamaha receiver. Silent Cinema is a technology developed by Yamaha that allows for surround sound through experience regular headphones.

I initially had my doubts, because I never noticed any surround sound effect when I was listening through ear buds, so I decided to finally order a set of high-end (well high-end for me) headphones and give them a try, I figured at the very worst the sound clarity would be improved. I picked up Audio Technica ATH-AD700 Open-air Dynamic Audiophile Headphones off of Amazon, and plugged it into my Silent Cinema jack. My experience was nothing short of jaw-dropping. I felt like a rube for not having these headphones earlier.  While I was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops
, on several occasions I could hear people running behind me. I watched Spiderman 2 (it was on HBO) and the surround effects in most of the scenes were very good. I'd almost prefer to listen to my entertainment through Silent Cinema now, because the sound is so crisp and perfect through the AD700's.

The AD700 was very comfortable to me, but my wife said it was a little big for her head.  They aren't the most fashionable headphones, but they make up for it in comfort and quality. One nice feature about these is they are "Open Air" meaning the cups have a grated back rather than a solid back. That prevents sound from bouncing around inside the cup and messing up what you're hearing. The added benefit for me as a dad is I can hear everything going on outside the headphones. The faint whimper of a fussy newborn is as audible as if I had no headphones on at all. I suppose these wouldn't be good for a listening in a loud space, but for me and what I use them for they're fantastic.

My Smartphone Gaming Habits (aka The art of multitasking while taking a crap)

I was watching Louis C.K. a few months ago on HBO or something and had an "amen" moment when he started talking about being alone at home. He pointed out that when you're married with kids and you're finally alone, you're not thinking about masturbating, you're happy to be taking a crap in peace. While I'll admit I take a long time to do my business, in our house trying to find out who "number two works for" while the kids are awake basically puts your potty time on a timer. You have X minutes to do your business and get back out to help your wife or a toddler is going to be knocking on the bathroom door looking for daddy and asking, "What doing, Daddy?"

In these brief moments in my bastion of solace, I'm generally fiddling with my Android while performing the more important task at hand.

Now, to be honest until recently I never really played many games on my smartphones.  I have owned a litany of smartphones of nearly every size and operating system for years now. I love my smartphones, but until recently the games for them basically sucked.  Now, I realize that the iPhone has had some pretty good games for some time now, but I refuse to buy an iPhone because [1] my wife already has an iPad, and [2] Apple is an organization of blood-sucking fascists bent on assimilating everyone into their black turtlenecked Borg... but the iPad is pretty cool...

Anyhow, so up until recently when I was hiding from my wife and kid (sorry honey) in the bathroom, I was mostly reading RSS feeds and browsing the web while I was doing my business. Around Thanksgiving I started ordering people's Christmas presents online from companies like ThinkGeek and Amazon, and since I'm on a tight schedule that led me to start ordering things from my smartphone while I was dropping the kids off at the pool. (Sorry, if I got you a present and you're reading this, I probably ordered it while I was pooping). Tools like Google Shopper and Amazon's Android app were very handy for this. Now that the holidays are over, and being smitten with the usefulness of the Android apps I'd been using to shop, I decided to explore some games I could maybe play during my precious "down time".

What I found really impressed me. I picked up The Sims 3 and Tetris for Android for less than a buck each, as well as a few free trials of simple (but addictive) games like Fruit Ninja and Hungry Shark.

The Sims 3 is nothing less than a near full fledged version of the Sims on my Android. The controls are intuitive, and in my opinion it's a little more fun than the PC version as it takes some of the tedium out of the usual Sims tasks.  It also fits nicely into short game play segments, which is perfect for my potty regimen. Tetris takes a little too long to be a go-to activity for bathroom breaks, while Hungry Shark and Fruit Ninja are just fine.

Pro Toilet Gaming Tips:

1. Never, ever, touch your screen between wiping and washing your hands!  I can't stress this enough. You put this device to your ear and subsequently, your face. Ew.
2. Turn the volume down on your smartphone, people don't want to hear it in public bathrooms and if your family hears you enjoying your bathroom time, they'll rush you out faster.
3. Don't do it at work! You don't need to get canned because your boss hears you leveling up in the next stall over.
4. Claim constipation before entering. This will buy you more time to get your game on.
5. Install a padded seat on your favorite throne. I haven't actually done this, but it seems like a good idea. This will keep your legs from falling asleep while dinking around with your smartphone. Make sure it's a sanitary padded seat that's easy to clean and ditch it if there's any sign of wear. There is nothing more disgusting than a padded toilet seat with cracks in it showing the padding. WTF could be growing in that?!

Please Don't Break Daddy's Toys: How to keep your toddler from destroying your favorite gadgets.

So I've come to the realization that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your toddler will get a hold of some valuable equipment and you will feel a cold shudder down your spine as you watch it dangle on the edge of destruction. It may be a gaming controller, it may be a programmable remote, or an iPad, or an Android phone or any number of Xbox 360 games, PS3 discs or Blu-rays. It doesn't matter what measures you take, rest assured someday you'll find yourself torn between your love for your child, and the urge to fly across the room roaring "Drop that right now!", or as my toddler would say, "MINE!"

I'll admit my setup isn't really great for protecting my stuff; Particularly my game consoles. It consists of some inexpensive Ikea home theater cabinetry that really only puts the consoles out of reach of anyone under twenty inches in height. The gnome population of our house has been thwarted quite well, but the toddler is undeterred. This coupled with the fact that the slightest touch will turn on or eject a disc from my PS3 or my 360 Slim means I'm constantly on guard and I'm really only counting the days until a peanut butter and jelly sandwich makes its way into a disc tray.

So far so good however, my daughter has interacted with my gadgets a minimal amount of time resulting in (knock on wood) zero damage.  I attribute this to my wife and I being very vigilant teaching my daughter, soon to be two years old, about what's daddy's, what's mommy's, what's hers, and even what's the dogs. Amazingly, this seems to have affected the dog too, as he's only really chewed his own toys and thankfully left my daughter's toys alone for the most part.

Now, I will state, for the record, I'm not a child psychologist, or a child care expert, or even an awesome parent; I am an ordinary dad, and probably even a little more uptight about people touching my crap than most parents should be. Success can be a fickle thing, but so far my (up to this point) winning strategy has been:

• Remember if my toddler breaks something important of mine, it's not the toddler's fault: It's either my fault, or it was an accident. There are rare cases where a toddler will intentionally break something, but those cases are either a parenting opportunity or the result of bad parenting IMHO.
• I keep things that are easily broken locked away if at all possible.
• When my toddler does grab some gadget of value to me I never, ever, freak out at her.
• Explain what it is the toddler is holding and why it's daddy's and we need to be gentle with it. (Gentle is a really frequently used word here at our house).
• Explain some stuff about the gadget and how it works to satisfy my daughter's curiosity, maybe even include a demonstration.
• I try to deflect my daughter's attention to something more interesting. A favorite toy or a task.
• My daughter in particular loves to help out. I often ask her to help me put my controllers and games away when she finds them, and in recent history I've even caught her putting them away before I even know she has them.

Despite our best efforts, our valuables as a whole are not without casualties. My wife has had her glasses broken by our well-intentioned little girl who was simply trying to help her "put them on, mommy". Tears have definitely been pulled out of my wife has she has watched my daughter twist the delicate arms off of her glasses. Generally, we try to take this opportunity to teach our child again why being "gentle" with other people's things is important, and how we should apologize if we accidentally break something that belongs to someone else. We've tried "never touch mommy's glasses", but that hasn't worked.

So, while it's impossible to keep your kid completely away from your precious loot; I think there are plenty of good ways to turn that situation into a more productive learning experience.

I can only hope my experience with our second child, my son, born just last week, will be as good as it's been with our first. At least as far as damage to my belongings go.  I do remember wrapping my dad's Buick around a sturdy oak when I was 16, though, so I figure I've got some payback in the works, but like I said: So far so good.