Mouse and Keyboard for XBox 360?

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.

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4 Answers

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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The Mayflash Max Shooter does work. I own one and just wrote a fairly detailed blog entry about it because I couldn't find a lot of information about it when I was shopping around for one. However I don't think any one of these tools, besides maybe the XIM2 will work like you think they will.

EDIT: I sold the Max Shooter and now I bought a XIM, which I've also reviewed if you're interested.

You can use any USB keyboard with your Xbox 360, however most games aren't coded with support for keyboard/mouse input (none to my recollection actually).

I was just interested in getting a keyboard to work with the Xbox 360 for entering passwords and navigating the dashboard just like my PS4 does. I tried using my Lenovo KU-1255 with an integrated trackpoint and Logitech DiNovo Edge, but they were not recognised.

Then I tried the special USB port on my Aten CS1794 HDMI KVMP switch with keyboard emulation and was surprised that the same keyboards worked on this particular port.

Conclusion: Plain USB keyboards work, keyboards with integrated pointing devices/functionality don't.