Gaming on your PC with a con­trol­ler might provide a better gaming ex­per­i­ence and you often don’t have to buy a new con­trol­ler at all. If you already own a Play­Sta­tion 4, you can connect its con­trol­ler to a PC or laptop in different ways. We’ll show how you can get started.

Most games can be played well on the PC with keyboard and mouse — es­pe­cially first-person shooters and build-up strategies work well on tra­di­tion­al PC setups for gamers. The situation is different for action games, for example jump ’n’ runs or fighting games. These games are usually easier to play with a suitable con­trol­ler.

Probably the simplest pos­sib­il­ity for a con­nec­tion is obvious:

• The PS4 con­nec­tion cable, used to charge the DualShock 4 con­trol­ler, can be connected to the computer via USB port.
• Starting with Windows 10, the con­trol­ler is usually re­cog­nised and the necessary con­fig­ur­a­tion is carried out auto­mat­ic­ally and quickly.
• Af­ter­wards, the con­trol­ler is ready for use and you can jump right in.

Depending on how old the game is, however, it might be that the button con­fig­ur­a­tion should be sorted out be­fore­hand. This can be done, for example, with a free tool like the DS4 con­trol­ler, which we’ll present at the end of the article.

Even with this con­nec­tion method, some games require a separate con­fig­ur­a­tion of the con­trol­ler. Next, we’ll show how to customize the PS4 con­trol­ler and change the button as­sign­ment for a game.

Unlike con­trol­lers from the Xbox series, which are tailored for use with Windows, some games do not recognise the PS4 con­trol­ler on PC. In other cases, the pre-set as­sign­ment of the buttons is not ideal, so they might need to be adjusted. In both cases, programs like DS4 Con­trol­ler help to recognise a Play­Sta­tion con­trol­ler and assign buttons in­di­vidu­ally.

This software converts con­trol­lers so that they are con­sidered Xbox con­trol­lers for Windows. This is necessary because Windows uses the Xinput interface to link con­trol­lers to a computer. The Xinput interface is limited to linking Xbox com­pon­ents to Windows, both of which are made by Microsoft.

With the use of programs like DS4 for Windows, it is suggested to the PC that the connected con­trol­ler is an Xbox con­trol­ler. It does not matter whether you connected the PS4 con­trol­ler to the PC via USB or Bluetooth.

Since the con­trol­lers have the same buttons (only with different names), ori­ent­a­tion is easy. For example, the [X] on the Xbox con­trol­ler is the [square] on the PS4 con­trol­ler, the [circle] cor­res­ponds to the [B] button, and the two joysticks and the dir­ec­tion­al pad are also used by both man­u­fac­tur­ers.

In this way, you can also directly find out via cus­tom­isa­tion whether the logic of the Play­Sta­tion as­sign­ment in the game cor­res­ponds to your preferred control options: Many Play­Sta­tion games like the `Witcher´ series, `Uncharted´ or `The Last of Us´ follow a very similar button as­sign­ment, so that, for example, racing is triggered via [L3] or ducking with the [Square] button. You can adjust this to your pref­er­ences — if not auto­mat­ic­ally re­cog­nised correctly — with the DS4Windows con­trol­ler.

In the menus of the games on the PC, the Xbox des­ig­na­tion is mostly used, so you will have to rethink a bit at this point. With a bit of practice within the games, however, the system becomes clear quite quickly, and nothing should stand in the way of hours of fun with the con­trol­ler on the PC.

DS4 for Windows must continue to run in the back­ground so that you can use the PS4 con­trol­ler on the PC. Therefore, the program has to be started again after a restart — or you can allow an autostart when the computer is booted.