The prime reason for doing this is that a lot of games on the PC control better with a gamepad these days, than with a Keyboard/mouse and since I detest using a gamepad at my desk, I figured this would be an interesting experiment, one that I might really enjoy.
A perfect example of this is Batman Arkham Asylum, which looks a lot better on the PC than the console versions but plays better with the gamepad than the keyboard/mouse. Dungeon Siege 3 and Darksiders would be other games, but I have not picked those up yet.
So, how did tonight go? Pretty good actually.
As I said, I am using my old PC which is a Core2Duo E8400 OC'ed to 3.5ghz, 8MB Ram, GTX285 and the motherboard sound off my Gigabyte P35-DS3R. This is being hooked up to a 46" Samsung 1080P LCD.
The first test was connecting the PC to the LCD and this was good as it instantly recognized the signal. I did need to recalibrate the screen a bit with the nvidia tools to get the desktop to fit, but that was simple. There is probably a setting for doing this manual, but I didn't play around long enough to care, so I just used the calibration to shrink the desktop to fit.
I didn't have a TOSLink cable for the fiber output, so I ran a PCM cable from my PC to my Onkyo 705 stereo system and after finally remembering how to select that PCM input correctly, I got the sound working fine through my 5.1 system.
I installed my Xbox 360 wireless adapter and the drivers for that.
Then I fired up Batman AA, which I had to install first. This is where things broke down a bit, because it uses Windows Live (which sucks), so I had to re-add my profile, cdkey and download the usual crap before I could play the game. This is a pain in the ass when you have to reach to the coffee table to do all that, but whatever.
The game was set to max graphics, 2xAA, physics turned on and 1920x1080 resolution for the LCD.
Anyways, after finally loading the game, I was blown away. The graphics for Batman AA are much better on the PC than the 360/PS3, which I knew from having run it on the PC before, but I was actually impressed by how much better they were after doing a direct comparison (switching inputs). There was also no slow down on my old system after playing the game for an hour or so. Now I think I am going to play through the entire game again.
Overall, I am pretty happy. I am going to experiment with a few other games in the near future, such as Fallout 3 and maybe Oblivion, as the idea of playing the PC version of Skyrim on my couch with a gamepad actually appeals to me, and I can always mod the hell out of it too with this option. Now, obviously games like Rage or BF3 wont be touched on this, as those are keyboard/mouse only games for me, but I could see a few RPG's and action games working awesome on it.
One of the nice things here too is that for games that slow down a bit on that hardware, I can always knock their resolution down to 720p quality, which still retaining the better graphics of the PC.
Anyways, it was pretty cool.
-----signature-----
I survived to the end and got nothing out of it, but hey.
