XIM3 gadget breaks cover to let you bring other controller types to your Xbox 360

The first video games I played as a kid were on a computer. I had an Atari like any other child of the 80's, but I always had a soft spot for the Commodore 64 and my old Tandy computer. As I got older, I migrated away from console gaming and went all in on the PC front, especially for shooters where I want a mouse and a keyboard not a gamepad for playing.

A device called the XIM2 landed a long time ago that let the Xbox 360 gamer plug in a mouse and keyboard for gaming on the game console and a new version of the device is showing up now that is much cooler and seems more advanced than the older device. The new offering is the XIM3 and it has a cool LCD to make programming the box easier.

It still allows you to hook that mouse and keyboard up to the Xbox 360 and then turns the inputs you have for the mouse and keyboard into input that you would get from a gamepad that the Xbox 360 can understand. The new device also has "Smart Translators" that are designed to handle various settings in different game titles and remove the dead zones that some shooters use. We don't know how much the thing will cost just yet, but it won't be cheap. The original was $149.99 so expect the XIM3 to be more than that.

Via Engadget