wiimote-mupen64

After spending agonizing hours trying to get it to work, I finally have a functional setup for using a Wiimote in Mupen64plus under Linux.

Overview

This contraption works by using wminput to get input data from the Wiimotes. wminput is not installed in Ubuntu by default and is available in the repos.

Steps to get it working

1. Cut a hole in a box.

2. Install wminput with

    sudo apt-get install wminput
   

3. Copy 52-wiimote.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/. You'll have to restart udev for it to take effect, but I had to restart the whole computer.

4. Copy wmconfig to .cwiid/wminput/

5. Copy the contents of mupen64plus.cfg to the [Input-SDL-Control1] section of ~/.config/mupen64plus/mupen64plus.cfg, replacing the existing contents of that section

6. Launch wminput with

    wminput -c wmconfig -r -w
   

7. Put the Wiimote in discoverable mode by pressing 1 and 2 simultaneously. After a few seconds, wminput should print Ready. to the console.

8. Launch mupen64plus with your game of choice.

9. ???

10. Profit!

About Bindings

I was setting things up in order to play the wonderful Jet Force Gemini, which influenced my choice of bindings. Other mappings are certainly viable; customize to your liking.

The format will be

• N64( Z ) :: Wii( B ) = SDL(5)

That is, the Z button of the N64 (the trigger under the joystick) will be bound to the B button of the Wii (the trigger on the Wiimote), which corresponds to the SDL keycode 7. It is the SDL keycode which goes into the mupen64plus.cfg file.

Bindings

• N64( L ) :: Wii( 1 ) = SDL(7)
• N64( R ) :: Wii( Z ) = SDL(9)
• N64( Z ) :: Wii( B ) = SDL(5)
• N64( A ) :: Wii( A ) = SDL(4)
• N64( B ) :: Wii( C ) = SDL(6)
• N64( Start ) :: Wii( Home ) = SDL(10)
• N64( C↑ ) :: Wii( D-pad↑ ) = SDL(0)
• N64( C↓ ) :: Wii( D-pad↓ ) = SDL(1)
• N64( C← ) :: Wii( D-pad← ) = SDL(2)
• N64( C→ ) :: Wii( D-pad→ ) = SDL(3)
• N64( Joystick X ) :: Wii( Joystick X ) = SDL(axis0)
• N64( Joystick Y ) :: Wii( Joystick Y ) = SDL(axis1)

Multiple controllers

To run multiple controllers, you'll need a separate wminput process for each controller; each wminput process can handle only one Wiimote at a time.

Wishes for the future

It would be nice to be able to use XWiimote instead of wminput since it comes with Ubuntu (it's a kernel module) and can be paired using the Bluetooth applet instead of running a daemon on the command line. SDL recognizes the Wiimote, but it creates a separate device for the main Wiimote and the nunchuck. So far as I can tell, Mupen64plus does not let you bind half of the buttons to one device and the other half to a different one.

This shouldn't be a problem if you are using a classic controller, since all of the buttons and joysticks needed are on it, but I don't have a classic, so I'm stuck for now. If anyone can figure out a way to make this work, I'd be most appreciative.