How to connect your Wii remotes

Dolphin offers three different methods to play your games using real Wii remotes.

The most straightforward one is to pair the Wii remote to your computer over Bluetooth and use it in the same way you would any other Bluetooth controller. However, connecting it this way prevents many features from working correctly and isn't recommended.

In order to make full usage of your Wii remote you'll want to use one of the other two options:

Passthrough a Bluetooth adapter

When using this method, Dolphin will take direct control of a USB Bluetooth adapter and use it in the same way a real Wii would.

This method gives the most accurate results, including audio support on the controller, but has two main drawbacks:

• Requires a custom udev rule
• Hardware compatibility is limited to a few models.

There's no practical way of installing a udev rule from within a flatpak (at least not without going against flathub rules), so the user must do this manually.

The project's wiki has information on how to set up the udev rule:

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Bluetooth_Passthrough#Linux

Compatibility table:

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Bluetooth_Passthrough#Adapter_test_results

Emulate the Wii's Bluetooth adapter

This method isn't as accurate as passthrough, but it has much better hardware compatibility and doesn't require installing any udev rules.

It only requires bluez which is bundled with the flatpak, and allow=bluetooth which is enabled by default in the manifest. Coupled with the improved compatibility this means it should work outside the box for most users.

How to enable motion controls on non-wii controllers

Some popular controllers such as those on the nintendo switch and ps4/ps5 feature motion sensors that can be used to approximate some Wii remote features.

Even though his bundle already ships with the necessary dependencies, depending on your distribution you may still need to manually add a udev rule to allow applications to access the motion sensors:

SUBSYSTEM=="input", KERNEL=="event*", ATTRS{name}=="*Motion Sensors", TAG+="uaccess"

Fedora users should place this rule under /etc/udev/rules.d/, it should also be the same in most other systems but it could also have slight variations from one distribution to another.

Permissions used:

device=all

This is required in order for arbitrary gamepads to work, as well as GPU acceleration.

If you don't like this and don't want gamepad support it is possible to change this to device=dri so that OpenGl will still work.

filesystem=host:ro

Grants read-only access to the host file system. Dolphin requires this in order to display the contents of your games directory on the main window when running on distributions shipping old libraries (tested on debian 10).

You can safely disable this on reasonably modern distributions.

socket=pulseaudio

Dolphin needs this to play audio.

env=QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb

This env variable fixes a hypothetical case that could prevent Dolphin from running if it were set to wayland, it's unlikely but we keep it just in case.

Usually this would only happen if the user had globally set the variable in order to force qt applications to run on native wayland mode, otherwise it is safe to drop.

socket=x11

Necessary in order to display the window, Dolphin has no wayland support at this point.

share=network

It's required by some features to work, such as netplay, firmware updates and the optional telemetry.

It's safe to disable if you don't want those features.

share=ipc

Graphical applications will run slowly without this.

allow=bluetooth

Only necessary when using "Real Wii remotes" in conjunction with the feature labeled "Emulate the Wii's Bluetooth adapter".

It's safe to disable if that feature is not in use, generic bluetooth gamepads will still work without it. Actual Wii remotes can also work without this option when using the separate passthrough feature.

filesystem=xdg-run/app/com.discordapp.Discord:create

Necessary for discord (a nonfree messaging service) integration.

Can be safely dropped if discord is not used.

talk-name=org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver

Required for screensaver inhibition during gameplay.

It can be disabled but your screensaver might trigger during gameplay depending on your input device and screensaver configuration.

Update frequency

We update on beta releases and dolphin progress reports (these usually happen at the same time).

We avoid development releases because netplay requires versions to match exactly for two users to play together. There can be several dev releases in any given day, this would make it difficult for players to match versions.