Nintendo Wii's Guitar/Drums Will Work On The Linux 4.19 Kernel

[ronshere]

"Going back to 2011 there's been a Nintendo Wii remote "Wiimote" driver in the Linux kernel but this unofficial hardware driver hasn't worked with some of the devices that can interface with the Wiimote like devices for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In 2018, that's now changed with the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.

The Nintendo Wii offered guitar and drums that could be attached to the Wiimote for playing games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. While the Wii has been discontinued for several years now, an interested developer with some of these old Wiimote devices managed to get the guitar/drums support working and based upon some never-mainlined patches from a few years ago but updated to work with the latest kernel/HID interfaces.


With just under 500 lines of code to the Linux kernel's Wiimote HID driver, the guitar and drums attachment for the Wii are now working. This code is going to the mainline kernel as part of the Linux 4.19 HID subsystem pull request."

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nintendo-Wii-Guitar-Drums-Linux

[JosJuice]

Or you could use Dolphin's Real Wii Remote mode or Bluetooth Passthrough mode, both of which already support all extension controllers

(Side note, I find it funny that the controllers pictured in the article all are Rock Band controllers rather than Guitar Hero controllers, since the Rock Band ones all connect over USB instead of being Wii Remote extension controllers...)

[Helios]

Larabel is not known for his stellar journalism.

but hey he's pretty good at benchmarking