This is a small tool to use a Wiimote as a gamepad.

Linux has had built-in support for the Wii Remote (Wiimote for short) since v3.1, support which was significantly cleaned up and improved since v3.11. However, the low-level kernel driver exposes each component of the Wiimote (accelerator, buttons, IR camera), as well as each extension, as a distinct device, none of which is (fully) functional as a controller ‘out of the box’ (the ‘buttons’ device —which the driver calls the controller ‘proper’— does appear as a joystick device to Linux, since it has a BTN_A mapping, but it's a device with no axes and thus not really usable).

A higher level interface (built on top of the Linux driver) is provided by xwiimote, which provides a library for ‘coalesced’ access to the Wiimote and its extension. As programs need to be designed specifically to make use of the library, this still doesn't allow an ‘out of the box’ experience.

The purpose of this tool is to allow any application to use a Wiimote —held sideways— as if it were a standard gamepad, with a 2-axes joystick (using the accelerometer), and a D-Pad.

Associate your Wiimote with your computer (details on how to do this are not discussed here, but you may want to look at xwiimote's page for additional information), then start the program. As long as the program is running, a virtual controller (called “Nintendo Remote in gamepad mode”) will be available. Just press Ctrl+C to terminate the program and ‘disconnect’ the virtual controller.

Syntax:

wiimote-pad [device]

where device is the path to a Linux-created device associated with the Wiimote (e.g. /dev/input/js0 or something like that). If no device is specified, the program will look for the first device that it can associate with and use that.

Since 2017, by default, the D-pad will be oriented in landscape mode (the arm closest to the A button will be mapped to right rather than down), in accordance to the Wiimote orientation.

This is a break from the previous behavior of the program. If you prefer the old behavior, you can pass the command-line option --dpad portrait, which will set the D-pad in portrait mode (arm closest to the A button will be mapped to down). You can enforce the new behavior with --dpad landscape, and even specify different D-pad settings for different Wiimotes, for example:

wiimote-pad --dpad portrait /dev/input/js0 --dpad landscape /dev/input/js1

will set the js0 Wiimote with the D-pad in portrait mode, and the js1 one with the D-pad in landscape mode.

wiimote-pad is specifically designed to expose the sideways Wiimote as a gamepad. All other Wiimote uses (especially the ones involving the infrared (IR) sensor) are outside of its scope. Please refer to the xwiimote and xf86-input-wiimote projects for those.

This repository also provides a set of udev rules to:

• change the group and the permissions of all Wiimote-related devices (both the kernel ones and the virtual one created by wiimote-pad);
• create descriptive symlinks for the event devices associated with Wiimotes.

By default the group assigned to Wiimote devices is bluetooth, you might need to tune it for your system. The group and permission change is needed so that applications that use the event interface instead of the joystick interface can still access the Wiimote.

Dependencies for wiimote-pad are libudev and libxwiimote. The latter should be version 2 or higher.

Just running

make

should work.

If you compiled and built libxwiimote yourself, you might need to fix the include path in the Makefile to point to the correct locations to look for the headers, or run

make XWIIMOTE=/path/to/xwiimote/sources

instead. By default, aside from standard locations, the Makefile will look for an xwiimote source directory in the parent of the wiimote-pad directory.