@ElectricKeet oh, i'm not sure if my choices count as wired. they can be wired, but don't have to be.
@gatewave If the wire is optional that's fine, so long as it can actually be plugged in and send data via wire instead of just charging from it.
@gatewave Last time I played with using a DS3 controller on PC, the software was kinda dodgy, but... I think I'm willing to dig up one of mine and have another go at it. Thanks for the recommendation!
@ElectricKeet ah, cool. the software side has improved immensely in the last 5 years
i still use SCPToolkit with good results https://sourceforge.net/projects/scptoolkit.mirror/
DS4Windows is newer but i have not used it and see conflicting info on whether it supports DS3
also Steam now natively supports DS4 but i am not sure about DS3
finally ViGEm is a new and promising project but i'm not sure how useable it is yet
https://github.com/ViGEm