Yep, that's right, I use an xbox360 wireless controller. They are widely available, high quality and can be found relatively cheap. The left joystick works great as the mouse while I use A/B as left/right click. All you need is the wireless gaming receiver and a great little freeware application and your set.

From the literature: Provides up to a 30-foot range for complete wireless freedom. The wireless gaming receiver is plugged into our HTPC in the basement. I've confirmed that it works throughout our 2 story home. It works great as a mouse to move around the screen and the 10 buttons and 3 joysticks are all configurable with a seemingly infinite set of combinations thanks to the fantastic joystick 2 mouse freeware. So with 3 of these controllers near the basement projector, main floor LCD and bedroom LCD we can control the HTPC and access movies, mp3's, games, pictures, the internet etc. The HTPC video is distributed to each of these displays via a hi-def component system.

Here's the mappable controls you can play with:

Here's my config files for joystick2mouse. Just copy them into your folder after installing the program and they'll give you a running start on controlling your HTPC and lots of examples on what you can do. I use the left and right bumper buttons as shift 1 and 2 respectively which lets me modify the operation of all the others. Currently this config allows me to do the following:

In order to map applications and webpages to be used by the joystick2mouse3 utility you need ot setup keyboard shortcuts for the various apps/pages. To do this navigate the start menu to the app you want to use. Right click the icon and select 'Properties'. You should see a 'Shortcut key' field. Place your cursor in this field and then hit a CTL-ALT key sequence that you'd like to use as a shortcut. For instance I have Firefox setup as shortcut CTL-ALT-f. In joystick2mouse you just setup a CTL-ALT-f action and Bob's your uncle, firefox will start. To do this for a webpage. Simply drag a bookmark onto your desktop or start menu and then give it a shortcut. I also setup hotkey selectable profiles in my video card's Catalyst Control Center so I can use the remote to change the HTPC's video output to work with either the downstairs projector or the LCD TV's upstairs.

I've barely scratched the surface on the possible combination uses of this controller. I mapped some key combos to bring up the above table as a help screen in case we forget one of the combinations.

Come on Microsoft, release a driver so we can use the chatpad accessory as a keyboard on our PC controllers!

While we wait for chatpad PC drivers from Microsoft, I've been using another great freeware package that gives me a virtual keyboard. Its called Click-N-Type. It works very well and allows me to do everything with the xbox360 wireless controller that I could do with a mouse and keyboard. I use the QWERTY101-Long user designed keyboard layout.