Bluetooth Passthrough with Atheros AR3012 (AR9462)

[easchel]

Hi guys,

Due to the fantastic feature of bluetooth passthroug I was able to play with almost native Wii Remote support, using a generic USB Bluetooth Dongle (CSR 8510 A10). As the compatibility (especially New Super Mario Bros. Wii) and the range were not that satisfying, I decided to order a Mini PCIe Card with an Atheros AR3012 (AR9462) chip. Full of joy I launched NSMB in Dolphin (build 5241) and I noticed that bluetooth passthroug had some serious issues when trying to sync Wiimotes. After that I did a clean installation of Dolphin (including deleting the folder user\documents\Dolphin Emulator), but unfortunately no improvments were noticeable. According to the log, it has problems in transfering commands (HCI command timeout; libusb transfer failed). After the error occurs and the message also appears in the emulator window, the game slows down to 8 FPS. Furthermore the USBdk driver seems to fail when this happens as I can see that the Bluetooth adapter is back in regular mode (Bluetooth icon in taskbar shows up again and the module has switched back to regular "Bluetooth USB Module" in device manager).

I've then tested various developer versions of Dolphin, also the older ones working with WinUSB / libusbK driver. But unfotunately no success.

Now the very strange thing is, that this error occurs with almost any game but not with (for example) Kirby's Adventure Wii. With this game I'm able to sync the Wiimotes and play the game. After that I was also able to play DK Country Returns (without sync, just pairing - it remembered the key). Then again NSMB didn't work again and after that the bluetooth passthrough was totally broke. It means, the bluetooth adapter didn't even switch to USBdk mode anymore. Finally, after uninstalling and reinstalling USBdk, syncing and playing Kirby's Wii Adventure as well as DK Country Returns worked again.

Long story short, is anybody else having these problems with an Atheros bluetooth adapter? I'm also not getting it, why syncing works on one game and not on the other. Could it be the HCI commands (like an overflow from some games)?

Any suggestions for improving the experience with that adapter would be great.

Thx

[KHg8m3r]

Have you looked at the Bluetooth pass-through Wiki: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Bluetooth_Passthrough

[easchel]

(08-24-2017, 01:25 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Have you looked at the Bluetooth pass-through Wiki: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Bluetooth_Passthrough

Thank you for your quick reply. Yes of course I did. I've seen that this adapter may have issues with HCI resets. But I really would be interested why the passthrough works with some games and with some others it does not.

[JMC47]

NSMBwii is harder on bluetooth connectivity than other games.

[kanokanor]

is there any way to fix this?

[themanuel]

(01-13-2019, 11:42 PM)kanokanor Wrote: is there any way to fix this?

I'm not sure but just to give you a taste of how many issues some of us are having with this game, even with an actual Wii BT adapter wired to USB, check out a few of the last posts in this thread.  We've come to suspect it is either a problem with Dolphin itself or the driver, although the driver has not changed in two years and I don't remember this game giving me all this grief when I started using BT passthgough.

[mbc07]

Keep in mind that there's a lot of different cards based on the AR5B22 reference design (which is AR9462 WiFi + AR3012 Bluetooth). Some of them perform near flawlessly while other are pretty bad, as you can see in the test results labeled as "AR9462" in our compatibility list...