Nintendont or even Devolution via Dolphin as of 2023?

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

There were some forum threads back in 2016 and 2017 inquiring about running Nintendont in Dolphin, primarily for Triforce arcade games, but the consensus then was that it wasn't possible since Nintendont uses Starlet and Dolphin (at the time?) only does HLE for Starlet.

But it's been 6 years and I'm wondering if the situation has changed at all.

Or, heck, if things would even work with Devolution if you used its alternative method for verifying games on a Wii U's "Wii mode" (which I'm pretty sure works on a Wii as well) except, in this case, using Dolphin as the "console" combined with bluetooth passthrough and an emulated SD card containing a disk image dumped from the corresponding physical SD card (I say all of this because it's my understanding that a version of Devolution without the copy-protection was never released whether officially or unofficially).


My main interest is that, currently, on a real Wii, I used Devolurion and later Nintendont to be able to play Nintendo Puzzle Collection with a classic controller connected to the wii remote for the usual "pseudo wireless" connection typically used by virtual console games and the like on a real Wii.

Furthermore, I have a motherboard that is currently gathering dust, the Asus Z87-Pro, with native built-in wifi/bluetooth that that supposedly "just works" with bluetooth passthrough (at least on Linux, which is my planned OS to use), and those Haswell Xeon CPUs go for really cheap on ebay nowadays (the ones with integrated graphics even support Vulkan on Linux).

The issue however is that Nintendo Puzzle Collection is a GameCube game and that means it does not natively support bluetooth passthrough if directly launched in Dolphin like normal, but things like Devolution and Nintendont are actual Wii software and therefore, in theory, would support bluetooth passthrough (though Devolution doesn't work with the final generation of Wii remotes, like the Toad-themed one).


I am aware that USB adapters exist, but I was more interested in just trying to re-create my existing Wii hardware setup.

[AdmiralCurtiss]

Dolphin still uses HLE for IOS, so you can't use Nintendont or anything like that.

However, what you can do is check the "Connect Wii Remotes for Emulated Controllers" checkbox in Controller Settings. That will make the Wiimote show up as an input device in the top-left of the input configuration menu, which you can then use to just map your Classic Controller's buttons to the emulated Gamecube controller.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Question related to that - is there some way to make an emulated classic controller be configured so that diagonal dpad directions are ignored and that, when pressing a horizontal and vertical direction (e.g. up and left), it always prioritizes the horizontal direction (i.e. left or right)?

There's an issue where the game Bust-A-Move 3000 / Super Bust-A-Move All Stars behaves differently with regards to diagonals compared to every other Bust-A-Move game before and after - in particular, diagonals prioritize up or down rather than left or right, but all other Bust-A-Move games prioritize left or right instead of up or down.

For context, I've been in contact with a guy making custom per-game button configurations for Nintendont that was able to fix this issue by basically just straight-up disabling the diagonals and is the solution I've been using thus far, but you're saying Nintendont can't be ran in Dolphin, so...

[JosJuice]

You should be able to (as an example) set d-pad up to something like: `Up` & !`Left`

(I didn't look up the exact button names, so you'll probably have to adjust it a little)

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Well then the question is, Does dolphin support per-game control configuration (yet)? I know this is something that N64 emulators have had for over a decade.

[JosJuice]

You can set a controller profile in a per-game INI file. See https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=GameINI_(Controller_Settings)