Rise from your grave!
The older DIY kits were $55 before shipping but required you to buy a controller that you then had to solder the board in to. The entire process took a minimum of two hours, and prebuilt units using this method were expected to cost around $150. Considering the increase in complexity of the boards from the older Revision B and newer Revision D "XFlex" boards, that $30 jump seems justified enough for the cost or a prebuilt XIM2. I'd prefer an $85 PCB and five-minute install myself, but I can solder well enough that the Rev B installation of my own XIM2 was without any mistakes or setbacks, and there are no doubt people who would manage to screw up the installation of the Rev D XIM2. By comparison, an XIM1 setup costs as much as this if the different hardware is purchased brand new, a PC to run the translation software (which is what allows the XIMs to be more accurate than XCM's XFPS or Mayflash's Max Shooter 2 in their emulation of the controller) would still be required, and then a $60 wireless headset is required if the player wanted to regain voice communication ability. The XIM2 doesn't have this problem with wiring a microphone through the device. It also has around 7ms of input lag versus the 35ms of the XFPS (or a XIM1 working through the XFPS), meaning that you can place it on top of an already-laggy PVA/MVA panel and manage to not break a fifteenth of a second between your actions and their appearing onscreen.
Just to clear up the prevalent misconception that the price of these are somehow skewed unfavorably given that the it includes a $30 controller and chip that would probably cost more than $80 if it were bought separately. The price of labor isn't likely to have changed much, if at all. The shock around this price is that people are finally seeing the full cost of implementing mouse/keyboard/joystick/whatever PC input device you have placed on a single piece of hardware, instead of spread over several. Obviously it isn't for everyone, but then how much have you have bothered spending almost as much to attain less functionality out of the earlier adapters? Or how many of you dump over $350 annually in to PC game controllers? $180 ($85 plus shipping and the cost of some wire, actually) to allow myself to use all of my joysticks, pedals, mice, wheels, gamepads, and flight sim gear on my Xbox 360 is well worth the cost.
This post has been edited by Second-Thought: Jan 19 2009, 11:13 AM