...right off the box! Kudos to curious Randy of Randy's Rants and Grant of Joystiq. After grabbing the newly-released game and controller bundle of Guitar Hero II, they simply plugged it into their Windows machines. And that's right: Windows recognized the controller perfectly.

It's really nothing new, but since Microsoft has been providing Xbox 360 controller ports to use your wireless Xbox 360 controllers on Windows, this controller just screams Plug n' Play.

Playing Frets on Fire, a free clone of Guitar Hero, Grant found that it even works great, after a little controller configuration. Window Vista may have a little bit of a frame rate problem with the game, but if you could step up to official Vista drivers, it should run fine.

Mac OS X is a slightly different story, as Grant claims the controller isn't recognized as an HID-compliant device, with GamePad Companion or the open source Xbox 360 driver.

Additionally, the OS X version of Frets on Fire couldn't be run successfully. So we could extend this post to the Apple blog hoping to catch the eyes of practicing porters and see if they could do anything about it.

Watch out though, butcher99 tried plugging his controller onto the USB port of his Windows Vista machine and Logitech devices, which could include ultra-sensitive G5 laser mice and G15 macro keyboards, to stop working. It's another compatibility problem that Microsoft doesn't have any solution for, except perhaps keeping the controller plugged into your Xbox 360.

Like Randy, we're anxious to know what the homebrew community can spruce up for this interesting little development. Photo courtesy of Randy.