Hello.

I bought a used Xbox 360 controller to test game development using XNA for PC and the upcoming Xbox 360. The XNA programming model works well, and I can access controller inputs like trigger pressure. I couldn't install the official Xbox 360 controller driver for Windows XP, but the XBCD drivers worked seamlessly. Find them at xbcd360guide.50webs.com (use at your own risk, the site looks a bit sketchy).

I just got the XNA Beta and had to tweak the template code a bit to get it running on my older machine (Athlon with a Geforce 2MX). I was getting a Device Creation Exception, and it turned out my graphics card doesn't support multisampling on the backbuffer. Adding "this.graphics.AllowMultiSampling = false;" to the InitializeComponent method fixed it. Hopefully, this helps someone else too! (P.S. Hardware donations are welcome! 😉)

I previously doubted the possibility of C# on Xbox 360 and a hobbyist homebrew version. I was wrong! Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2005 Express for Xbox 360 content creation on August 30, 2006. The $99/year dev kit allows non-commercial game development and sharing among hobbyists (no network support yet). I'm excited to get an Xbox 360, Xbox Live account, and the developer account! Check out these resources: XNA Team Blog, Microsoft XNA homepage, XNA FAQ, Game Studio, News Report, another Blog Post.