XBox 360 Controller driver for Mac OS X

About

This driver supports the Microsoft Xbox 360 controller, including access to rumble motors and LEDs, on the Mac OS X platform. It includes a plugin for the Apple Force Feedback Framework so some games will be able to activate them, along with a Preference Pane with which allows you to test everything is installed correctly. Both wired 360 controllers connected via USB, and wireless 360 controllers connected via the Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows, are supported.

This project is a fork of the Xbox360Controller project originally created by Colin Munro.

Installation

See the releases page for the latest compiled and signed version of the driver. Most users will want to install and run this.

If you are interested in installing as a developer please see below.

Usage

The driver exposes a standard game pad with a number of standard controls, so any game that supports gaming devices should work. In some cases this may need an update from the manufacturer of the game or a patched version. The Preference Pane uses the standard Mac OS X Frameworks for accessing HID devices and accessing Force Feedback capabilities, so should be a good test that the installation is functional.

List of working and non-working games.

Developer info

Anything below this probably doesn't affect end users, so you can stop reading now if you just want to use the driver.

Building

You'll need the full xcode installed via the app store. The command line tools are not enough.

From the command line, run: ./build.sh

If you'd like to build the .pkg file, there is an installer project for Packages. Download packages at http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Packages/about.html and the resulting dmg file will be copied to the build directory.

The distribution currently consists of 3 projects - one for the driver (implemented in C++, as an I/O Kit C++ class), one for the force feedback support plugin (implemented in C, as an I/O Kit COM plugin) and one for the Preference Pane (implemented in Objective C as a preference pane plugin). Ideally these 3 targets should be in the same project, but I've not worked on this yet.

To build, use the standard Xcode build for Deployment on each of the 3 projects. Build Feedback360 before 360Controller, as the 360Controller project includes a script to copy the Feedback360 bundle to the correct place in the .kext to make it work.

To debug the driver, sudo cp -R 360Controller.kext /tmp/ to assign the correct properties - note that the Force Feedback plugin only seems to be found by OSX if the driver is in /System/Library/Extensions so I could only debug it in place.

To test the Preference Pane, just double-click the resulting file.

Yosemite and signed drivers

Since Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10) all global kexts are required to be signed. This means if you want to build the drivers and install locally, you need to have a mac developer account.

If you'd like to avoid paying apple for the developer account and want to disable the signature checking, execute the following commands inside a terminal:

sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1"
sudo kextcache -m /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions

In addition, you will need to disable System Integrity Protection. In order to do this, you must boot into recovery mode. When starting the computer, hold down CMD + R. This will get you into recovery mode. From there, simply open the terminal using the utilities menu item, then enter this command:

csrutil disable

In order to undo these changes, within recovery mode run:

csrutil enable

And within the normal OS, reset the boot args using:

sudo nvram -d boot-args

This will clear all boot args, so if you have boot args already, you will have to change your boot args an alterate way.

Note that disabling driver signing is probably a bad idea unless you understand the implications of running unsigned driver code.

Debugging

Most of the debugging I did was via printing out text. In 360Controller, you can use IOLog(), and the output will appear in system.log. In Feedback360 normal fprintf(stderr,...), and the output will appear on the console of whatever application is attempting to use Force Feedback. In Pref360Control, NSLog() works as it's an Objective C program, and will output to the console of the Preferences application.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2006-2013 Colin Munro

This driver is licensed under the GNU Public License. A copy of this license is included in the distribution file, please inspect it before using the binary or source.