How to use your Wii Remote and its peripherals as controllers on your computer

By Stephen Munn | November 15, 2008

Back when I was playing certain games on my Windows PC using a gamepad, I got by with a Gravis Gamepad Pro, a USB affair that I still have hanging around here somewhere. I haven’t touched the DualShock-inspired gray and purple thing in quite some time, particularly now that I’ve spent more time gaming on my various consoles, but now that I’ve got all these far superior console controllers sitting around my home, it’s pretty obvious what needs to happen: I’ve got to use my Wii Remote and DualShock3 as controllers for gaming on my Mac, and I need to be able to do it both in Leopard and in Windows XP, which I have installed on a partition using BootCamp. Today, we’ll do the Wii Remote, and save the DualShock3 for another day. Let’s roll.

The Wii uses Bluetooth technology to communicate with its controllers, so that’s going to be the first hurdle to leap. Make sure your computer has Bluetooth capability. If you’ve got a modern Mac, you’re all set, as all the Macs Apple produces now have it sandwiched right onto the Airport card (which is the friendly name for the network card for all you PC people out there). If you don’t have Bluetooth on your computer, don’t fret. Bluetooth cards are very cheap, and shouldn’t set you back much more than ten dollars if you’re paying attention. Leopard and XP can both handle Bluetooth, so you don’t have anything to worry about there. If you’re using an XP partition on a Mac through BootCamp, that app will set it up for you when you install XP, placing all the drivers needed to get all your Mac’s functionality running in Windows properly.

Leopard

For Leopard, you need to use a program called DarwiinRemote. It’s tiny and free and clumsy, but here’s how you set it up. Download it and drop it into your Applications folder (because that’s what we do, isn’t it?) and launch it. If you haven’t shut off your Bluetooth capabilities on your Mac, you need to make your Wii Remote “discoverable” by holding the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously. While you’re doing that, click Find Wiimote in the DarwiinRemote window. Then wait. This tends to take a couple of tries for some reason, but eventually you’ll see the chart begin to register the motions of the Wii Remote and the diagram at right will light up as you press different buttons. Turn off the motion sensors by clicking the Motion Sensors button, because there’s no point in trying to use that for what we’re doing here.

Open the app’s Preferences panel by clicking through DarwiinRemote>Preferences or CMD-, and click “Add” at the top to make a new profile. Notice that you can use this application to set up key mapping for the Wii Remote, the Nunchuk, the Classic Controller, or a mouse. Pick your poison and start mapping. At far left you’ll see what the button is named on your controller, and then in the drop-down for each you can choose what key that will map to. If it’s not in the list, either select “Key” and type it in the field, or check the appropriate box at right for shift, control, option, or command respectively, since those keys can’t be typed into the text box provided. There is no way to map tilts or gestures to key presses unfortunately, even if you leave those sensors turned on.

It helps here to have two windows open side-by-side: this one where you’re mapping the controls, and the one in the target game or application that lets you set what keys to use for what. That way there’s no swapping back and forth to figure out what’s going where. The last thing to remember is that “up” on the Wii Remote is actually “left” when you hold the Wii Remote sideways, so you need to compensate for that when mapping the d-pad. For example, if your target program (BSNES in the case of this image) will have you using the Wii Remote sideways, you need to map the directionals as shown above. When you’re done mapping, you can click OK, or click Add again to make a new profile for another application. You’ll need one for every target application if the mapping is going to be different. Then you can open DarwiinRemote, sync your Wii Remote, select the profile and click OK, then launch your application. Doesn’t get much easier than this, but it may work better to go into each individual application and set up your key controls to conform to a single Classic Controller profile, saving you the trouble of selecting different profiles for different applications. But of course, that’s a matter of preference.

Windows XP

The Windows option is much harder to pull off than the Leopard one. Again, you’re syncing a Wii Remote with a special application using Bluetooth and mapping the button presses to keystrokes. In XP, you’re using Carl Kenner’s GlovePIE, another free program. The author’s server is overloaded, so I had to get it elsewhere. There’s an open source alternative in the works called OpenPIE, but it doesn’t appear to be ready as of this writing. GlovePIE is not the friendliest program in the world, but it’s free and gets the job done without making you die, so let’s get to it.

First, you need to open your Bluetooth Control Panel and sync up your Wii Remote as a device. Hold 1 and 2 on the Remote and click Add in the panel. For me, this took multiple attempts as for some reason the connection was repeatedly lost as soon as it was made. Once you’ve got the connection made (there is no passkey, as you can see) you can rename it to Nintendo Wii Remote if you like (instead of RVL-whatever) by selecting the device and clicking Properties and choosing a new name. Click Apply and OK.

Next, open GlovePIE. You have two ways to approach this. You can either hand code the mapping for the controller or you can use the GUI tab to do it by clicking. Shown here in both is my completed code for playing Konami Collector’s Series: Castlevania and Contra using the Wii Remote turned sideways in Windows. Neither way is great. You need to know the language it’s using to write your own, or you have to deal with clicking things in the right order in the GUI. One wrong click and everything just disappears and you get to start over. Fortunately, it’s not as complicated as it looks.

At left, click “detect output to emulate” and select keyboard. If your Wii Remote is synced up, click “detect input” and once the application picks up the Remote’s presence, you can start mapping. Select a key from the list at left, then choose Wiimote, 1, and the input on the controller, in this case, Right. Then you need to click Apply. Repeat this for every mapping, and you’ll see a little asterisk appear next to each key that has a map assigned to it. What was confusing for me was that this feels like it’s going backwards. First you’re selecting the destination, then the source. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

I mentioned this above, but since you may not have read that part, I’ll repeat it. Keep in mind if you’re going to be using a Wii Remote turned sideways that the D-pad’s directions need to be adjusted for. Up on the Wii Remote is Left on a Wii Remote turned sideways, and so forth. You can see this in my code above in the screenshot, how Left is mapped to Up.

Once you’ve finished your mapping, you can save your little program to disk, creating a sort of profile for every game or application you might use your controller with.

One last thing

I have to credit GlovePIE with making a lot of games much friendlier, since you can play them with a comfortable controller rather than a keyboard. While strategy games may be best suited to play on a keyboard, there are a lot of games that aren’t. I would say most of those originally appeared on consoles, but eventually found their way to home computers one way or another. Have fun out there!