While the Mac platform has not been noted for catering to hard-core gamers, there are still many popular gaming titles and gaming accessories available for the Mac OS. If you own a Mac and have a few games you would like to try, then you might also be interested in getting a gaming controller or two up and running with your system. While the Mac's keyboard and mouse ought to be enough for most purposes, having a dedicated gaming controller can give you the feel of playing with a gaming console.

Of the game controllers available for home computers, only a few are officially supported on the Mac, but you can often get others, like those for the PS3, Wii, or Xbox, working just fine. To use any of these controllers with your system, you will first need to connect it to your system physically, and then install a driver package to make use of the controller's inputs.

Now, you might be comparing the two 'Buffalo Classic USB' controllers offered on Amazon (as of late June 2017) and wondering what the heck the difference is between the BSGP815 (this product listing) and the older BSGP801 (Buffalo iBuffalo Classic USB Gamepad for PC BSGP801GY). I own them both.

For factory-supported devices like the and the, drivers are available from their manufacturers; however, for unsupported devices like Wii Remote, PS3, and Xbox controllers, you will have to use a third-party driver package. The easiest of these unsupported remotes to configure is likely the Xbox controller, which can be (physically) connected directly via USB or with a for wireless Xbox controllers. If you have a PS3 controller, you'll need to follow a quick procedure to establish a connection to your Mac. First, connect the controller to your Mac, and then open the Bluetooth system preferences and make sure Bluetooth is both on and discoverable. Next, hold the PS button on the controller for a few seconds, then unplug the USB cable, and the controller should appear in the Bluetooth system preferences and be available for use in a number of games and programs. A Wii Remote can also be connected via Bluetooth.

Once the gaming controller is connected, you can use one of several software driver packages to configure its inputs. The first is, with which you should be able to configure most gaming controllers. The second is the for Xbox controllers, which should work for both wired and wireless (using the receiver noted above) controllers. For Wii users, the program and the should allow you to crudely connect and configure the motion-sensitive Wii Remote, but if you have trouble establishing a connection using these drivers in OS X 10.8, then you can try a that should work in the latest version of OS X. A final couple of driver options for these controllers are, which is available in the Apple App Store, and, which has been a long-standing option for configuring USB input devices on the Mac platform.

These last tools are useful especially if you have a controller that only has driver support for Windows. When connected to the Mac, the button inputs will be registered, and universal drivers like USB Overdrive should be able to recognize them and allow you to assign global or application-specific settings to them. Post them below! Be sure to check us out on and the.

Hi everyone, i read a lot about this issue but all report and fixes are for pc. I've read on windows you can go back to xna version of TA in the beta tabs but what about MAC? I do not find any XNA version on the list. Microsoft word download for mac. How can i fixed it?

I try to configure the controller in big picture but that's really impossible because steam do not recognize all the buttons i need and with the default settings TA won't either accept the 'start' one. PLEASE, HELP!

I buy this game and i would like to have a 2 players match in versus mode without need to map the keyboard for that - i know how to do with keyboard but that's not a good 2 players game experience. Thanks everyone. Well I also use a mac, and I use these SNES USB controllers: (search ibuffalo on because I can't get the link to work). Do yours work with other games on your mac? I had to configure them in big picture, and I don't remember if I ran into any problems with that or not, but it worked perfectly in the end. I don't know how controllers work with Steam games, but Towerfall recognizes my controller and knows its name, and even knows what color the buttons are, so maybe Matt programmed the game to specifically recognize that controller?