Dokapon Kingdom: "Netplay has desynced. There is no way to recover from this."

[SimpleAsThat]

Up until recently, Dokapon Kingdom (R2DEEB) was unplayable over netplay. This was because Dolphin didn't handle Wii Remotes over netplay, so players would be met with an impassible "Lost Connection to Wii Remote 1" message after starting up.

Though this was fixed, I am having a different issue.

Upon connecting with a friend for Netplay, and setting GC Pads 0 and 1 to myself and my friend, and Wiimote 0 to myself, then starting the game, the game immediately freezes after the Safety warning begins to fade in. I see nothing, but my friend gets the PanicAlert "Netplay has desynced. There is no way to recover from this."

I did some digging and found that a WiimoteUpdate method is what calls this error, and sure enough, removing the Wii Remote makes the game work fine. However, the game doesn't let us continue past it's first screen without one.

I posted this as an issue to the official bug reporting site and got told this was almost definitely user error, and was told to make sure my friend's, and my, Wii folders matched up.

I downloaded Dolphin 4.0-551 from scratch, deleted my old Dolphin Emulator folder from My Documents, and had my friend send me his exact folder. Even now, with identical settings, we still get the error. I'm at a loss. I've tried multiple different Dolphin versions but nothing has worked. Any ideas?

[JMC47]

According to a recent issue report, some setups have it working. If anything, the netplay is desyncing regardless, but Wiimotes are so tight over netplay that they can detect desyncs. This means that even without the Wiimote plugged in, your emulators are not perfectly synced. Try playing a Wiigame that actually lets you use GC controllers and see if it is synchronized. if it isn't, then that's why you're getting the message.