So, this is my fault. At first, I read this as you asking for help for your own son, so the advice here is a bit more... guided in terms of instructions and what not.
Anyway, I spent long enough writing this up and I think that it's a good resource given the topic, so I'm going to add it here. I'd love to see what you come up with regarding the controller. If you are capable of making those conversions, check out what I had to say about he 10keys and getting one made out of all F-keys. I went through this same process. I have EDS and really needed a gamepad for my right hand because I can't reach across to hit multiple keys at once.
Anyway, I've done a few things to try and solve it. I did buy the Nostromo to try it out, and I can say that, even though it is uncompromisingly for the left hand, it's a great piece of equipment. The software that it comes with for remapping keys worked really well also -- still, not an optimal solution.
The next thing I did was the best solution I came up with for day-to-day computing. I went to Office/Staples and bought one of those cheap USB 10-key pads. All told, you wind up with 18 keys that you can reprogram to do whatever you need using AutoHotKey. If you spend enough time to be familiar with the basics of AHK, you can program it so that the keys do different things depending on which program you have open -- For me, the 7 key would paste formatting if I was working in Excel or Outlook, but if I was in Chrome it would copy the highlighted text, open a new tab, send the browser to Google, paste in the text that was previously highlighted and search for it.
Obviously in games there are any number of things you can do, since AHK allows macros to be programmed. The downside here is that the PC does actually recognize it as a 10key numeric pad no matter what, and I haven't been able to trick it into not doing that -- meaning that you can only use one of these at a time, since if you had two plugged in they would both be sending "9" when you press the 9 key. If that makes sense at all... I'm sure someone here, though could come up with a way to bypass this by doing a 10key pad with the normal keys, and a second 10 key pad made up entirely of F-keys. I would love to buy the second set... It would give you a programmable 10key pad that doesn't interfere with your ability to 10key.
I'm getting long winded here, but I hope this might helps since I've gone through it.
The gaming solution is easy. First, go to BestBuy or Gamestop and purchase a WIRED Xbox360 controller. The wireless ones require an adapter dongle that is more expensive than the controller itself, have sketchy Mac compatibility (if any), and cause problems with some games. Then...
If you're on a
PC:
Go to the Microsoft website and download their official driver for the Xbox 360 controller. Install it on your machine, plug in the controller, and you're good to go. The X in the middle of the controller should light up here. I use this set up almost daily at home (admittedly through bootcamp, but that doesn't really make a difference), and I haven't had a bit of trouble out of it.
If you're using a
Mac:
The standard Microsoft driver won't work for you on a Mac (surprise!) so you'll have to find a different one. I found one that works great, and give you a fair number of settings to fool with. You can download it for yourself here:
http://tattiebogle.net/index.php/ProjectRoot/Xbox360Controller/OsxDriver -- Once you get this installed, you should be up and running with the controller. The X in the middle of the controller will NOT light up when you're using it on a Mac.
Many Steam games are Controller compatible now, at least partially, but if you come across one that isn't you can use software to make the controller emulate keystrokes. The aforementioned AutoHotKey may allow you to do this on Windows, but there is another program called Joy2Key that is made for converting Gamepad input to keyboard scan codes to fool games. If you pair Joy2Key with AutoHotKey, you can assign Macros to controller buttons (ie. use Joy2Key to set the UP button on the D-Pad to the HOME key on your computer. Then use AutoHotKey to create a macro that would send the signal for "SHIFT+A+F+4", which in this example is your in-game key combo for launching the "kill all the bad guys" spell, when you press the HOME key on your computer. You may have to work back and forth with the order in which you link the actions, as you have USB inputs, scanner codes, and fake codes). The only word of caution with this is that I've heard that some multi-player online games view this sort of key-mapping macro to be cheating and will ban your account. I don't have any first-hand experience with this discrimination (frankly), but I have heard rumors.
So, that should solve some of it. I was
not able to find a true gamepad that is solely for the right hand, but I quit looking for one around last Christmas.
