The Wii U is now a deprecated gaming console, which makes me much more interested in it. I have had one for a little while but the Gamepad digitizer has been broken for some time. I originally set out to fix the game pad but the issue with some of the buttons not working along with the digitizer, it had me thinking I should just replace the whole thing so I can start using the console. On the hunt for the replacement Gamepad, I also acquired a couple of these Wii U Pro Controllers. I wanted these in order to play this “New Super Mario Wii U” game and compare it against my favorite of the franchise. I think putting “New” in the title is a bit silly because it isn’t new now.
Upon holding the Wii U Pro Controller in my hand, it felts so good… almost perfect for my somewhat long and gangly fingers. I wanted to try out these Wii U pro Controllers on Linux, play some Steam games but fully expecting the process to be a headache; you know, because Nintendo. I made the assumption that I would have to install xwiimote to get it to work but upon reading and some further understanding of all the work some incredibly smart people have done, I only need that for the Wii Remotes. The machine I tested this on is running openSUSE Tumblweed Kernel 4.16.0 and it is my understanding that the wiimote kernel drivers have been in place since 3.1.
Setting up the Wii U Pro Controller
I opened terminal to see the kernel messages concerning this device by running: dmesg
[86905.904160] wiimote 0005:057E:0330.000B: hidraw1: BLUETOOTH HID v0.01 Gamepad [Nintendo RVL-CNT-01-UC] on 80:00:0b:82:a8:1f
[86905.904169] wiimote 0005:057E:0330.000B: New device registered
[86905.981821] wiimote 0005:057E:0330.000B: detected device: Nintendo Wii U Pro Controller
[86906.011799] wiimote 0005:057E:0330.000B: detected extension: Nintendo Wii U Pro Controller
[86906.011889] input: Nintendo Wii Remote Pro Controller as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.5/2-1.5:1.0/bluetooth/hci0/hci0:34/0005:057E:0330.000B/input/input33
Now I was excited.
I opened up Steam and started the game, “River City Ransom: Underground”, completely bypassing any of the configure input device to see what would happen. To my shock and blissful amazement, everything worked as expected. I hopped out of the game to see the controller settings and it was recognized it as a Wii U controller.
I also checked out this “Desktop Configuration” setup with Steam. As long as Steam is running, I can use this Wii U controller to as an input device for controlling my Linux Desktop. I like this particular interface because I can define what each button does. This is a feature that KDE Plasma doesn’t seem to have built in and I don’t want to create an Xorg configuration for this either.
This truly is a lot of fun to play with. Sure, it is probably just a novelty for now but I am thinking that I might want to make this a controller for my living room media machine along with the wireless keyboard/touchpad device as that is almost overkill when you just want to browse and watch some Netflix.
Final Thoughts
I really was expecting to do so more to do to get this working. On one hand I am very pleased on how easy it was to get working. On the other had I am a bit disappointed as I expected a bit of a project out of this and I was going to make the whole process “easy” and simple in a short write up. Instead, I get to tell you that the Wii U Pro Controller works great in Linux and is a great choice for modern (what little I do) and retro gaming. Best of all, no USB dongles to worry about losing!
External Links
XWiimote open-source Linux device driver for Nintendo Wii / Wii U Remotes