HOWTO: Get a Wii-U Pro Controller Working, including in WINE

dugan · 02-02-2017, 12:53 AM

I thought the steps to getting a Wii-U Pro Controller working were worth documenting...

Setup

Have your user account in the "games" group and following udev rule in say, /etc/udev.d/10-local.rules. That will give your user permission to use it:

Code:

DRIVERS=="wiimote", GROUP="games", MODE:="0660"

Have the following X configuration setting in, say, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-local.conf. That will fix the issue with the right stick moving the mouse cursor:

Code:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Nintendo Wii Remote Pro Controller Whitelist"
    MatchProduct "Nintendo Wii Remote Pro Controller"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

Then just pair, trust and connect it using blueman-applet. The "sync" button on the back is the one you use to put it into pairing mode.

Steam

I just use Steam's Big Picture to set up the controller's button mappings. That gets the controller working properly with, really, all Linux Steam games.

WINE

I'm on a multilib system, and I use WINE to run 32-bit games. Here's how I got my Wii-U Pro controller working with DoDonPachi Resurrection, which runs with the wrong button mappings otherwise.

In a 32-bit VM, I built SDL2 and koku-xinput-wine. I transferred the SDL2 package to my 64-bit multilib installation, converted it with convertpkg-compat32, and installed it.

I ran "wine control" and saw that there were two joysticks: one "js" and one "event". I disabled the "js" one.

I copied the gamecontrollerdb.txt, linked from koku-xinput-wine's README file, to DoDonPachi Resurrection's installation directory.

From that directory, I used WINE to run the executable, which is named default.exe:

Code:

LD_PRELOAD="/path/to/koku-xinput-wine.so" wine default.exe

And the game works with proper gamepad mappings! As far as I know, koku-xinput-wine is the only way to set it up. Yes, I tried to use x360ce (never works for me).

Clearly, koku-xinput-wine is the definitive way to get gamepads working with WINE.

Other Stuff

That's all I've been able to test lately, but the BoilingSteam article MAKING THIRD-PARTY GAMEPADS WORK WITH STEAM GAMES and its Discussion on Reddit is worth checking out.

Bindestreck · 02-02-2017, 01:33 AM

Wow, you are the king Dugan! Thank you Sir!

dugan · 02-12-2017, 01:25 PM

Possibly relevant: my user is part of the "games" group, and I had the following udev rule active (it's part of what's needed to get a Steam Controller to work):

Code:

KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="games", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

dugan · 04-17-2017, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Code:

DRIVERS=="wiimote", GROUP="games", MODE:="0660"

Turns out, this also works for Switch Pro Controllers.

willysr · 04-17-2017, 01:57 AM

You might want to write it on Slackware Documentation Project