I’ve been wanting a gamepad I can use on my Mac and my Linux box. I almost picked up a Xbox 360 wired controller since its has a standard USB interface and there is driver support on both platforms however, thanks partly to EB games being out I decided instead on plan B - reuse something I already owned.
I had a couple of Xbox S controllers lying around that I haven’t been using. I like the S controllers, they fit my hands nicely and have a good feel to them. I also have a ton of extra USB cables laying around. While browsing around the net I found some instructions on how to splice a USB cable together with the controller cable. In concept, its quite easy since the original Xbox cable is basically a USB cable with a funky connector. Its just a matter of stripping each cable and matching up like color to like color. I practice, the wires in my USB cable that I spliced in were so thin that it was a bit difficult (for me) to cleanly strip them at first without slicing into the wire itself.
A little solder and electrical table later I had a working cable. I had to download drivers for OS X to get it to work on my Mac but Dapper Drake recognized it without me having to do anything.