Wiimote + Bluetooth = Awesome lightgun / NES Zapper and 2600 Paddle controller!

[djrobx]

I've been having SO much fun playing certain games I haven't been able to play well in so long, I just had to share this with my fellow classic gaming fans!

Turns out the WII remote is a bluetooth device. And per the usual, some smart folks floating around the internet have figured out how to make it useful as an input device on a computer! The best part is, since I already had a Wii and a bluetooth adapter, I got an exciting "new toy" without having to spend any additional money!

Firstly, the Wiimote can be used with the IR emitting sensor bar to be a highly accurate pointing device, like a lightgun that works on ANY type of TV. That's huge for me, I've had an HDTV set since December of 98 so lightguns have been a no-go for a very long time. I tried some guns like the RGT-G1 but the accuracy was horrible. Couple the Wiimote with Nestopia, and you can play the NES zapper games on your bigscreen. I've found Nestopia to work by far the best of the NES emulators with regards to lightgun emulation. Fceu for some reason has trouble keeping the crosshairs on screen and its difficult to get it smooth. With Nestopia, the experience is so fluid and playable. I've been playing Gumshoe, I've forgotten how much fun that game is.

The wiimote can be used with MAME but unfortunately not nearly as easily as the NES. You must use PPJoy to emulate a joystick since Mame does not accept absolute coordinates from mouse devices. But once you get it going it works pretty well.

Which brings me to....Atari 2600 paddle games! The wiimote also has motion sensors. You could continue to use the Wiimote in lightgun mode and "point" to track the 2600 paddle controller (which works reasonably well), but I've found its more fun, and more intuitive to rotate the controller and hold it in two hands like some Wii driving games. Instead of twisting a dial, you "steer" like you would a car. I do about as well with Kaboom as I used to with the real controller. Great stuff.

The big disappointment, is, once again, MAME's weak analog input device mapping support. In "paddle" controller mode, you can play Arkanoid very well and it's a lot of fun. But Arkanoid 2 and Arkanoid Returns have problems due to MAME not dealing with the "Extremities" well since a real encoder-dial can spin indefinitely. But there's so many different ways you can configure the Wii remote thanks to GlovePie's scripting, that you can do almost anything you can thnk of with a little elbow grease.

If you're interested in checking it out, there's a bit of a howto here,

http://www.wiili.org/index.php/HowTo:BlueSoleil

and a discussion forum here with loads of script examples

http://www.wiili.org/forum/

I highly suggest going with BlueSoleil bluetooth drivers, since BlueSoleil + GlovePie will auto-connect a wii remote, which is a big pain in the booty without it.

[Stu1983]

I've been thinking about buying a wii remote to mess about with on the pc for a while now, pay day is just a round the corner so I think I might invest can the nunchuck be used with the pc to?

On a side note I just got the LCD Topgun from play asia and I must say it really is a fantastic lightgun for mame and not a bad price either £28 includung postage, I've had a couple of shit pc guns in the past but I'm amazed at how well this one works

[Stu1983]

This might be of some interest to you, it's a gun surround for your wii remote

http://www.contactdata.nl/piranha/index.php?action=5#69