We've seen some notable improvements made to Dolphin lately, from the rewrite and unification of its video back ends to the addition of a Netplay server browser; yet the news doesn't seem to stop there. Thanks to the efforts of a developer known as Billiard, the ever so popular Gamecube and Wii emulator is finally able to add a long sought after feature to its list of capabilities: Wii MotionPlus emulation!

The peripheral was originally released by Nintendo in 2009 as a small dongle that could be connected to the Wii Remote's extension port. Thanks to it, supported games could make use of its integrated gyroscope, allowing for better and more precise motion controls. The company also released the Wii Remote Plus around a year later, which integrated the MotionPlus' features inside the remote itself, thus removing the need of an external dongle. Some popular games which require the MotionPlus in order to be played are The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Wii Sports Resort, and Red Steel 2. Emulating the device proved to be a challenge for Dolphin's developers, meaning the only possible solution to play said games was to connect a real Wii Remote and MotionPlus to the PC. However, this is no longer the case, as MotionPlus emulation is now available starting from build 5.0-10056! The dev team has uploaded a video demostrating the feature in action:

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A technical explaination has also been posted on Dolphin's blog, documenting everything from understanding the device's encryption to getting precise motion controls to work, which is linked in the sources below.

Source
Download

 

[Sakitoshi]

While this is great, Skyward Sword is a quite annoying game. Anyway to make Fii shut up?

just stuck a bunch of...cheats in her mouth.
skyward sword get's the flack for being a weak entry because is too reliant on the all mighty sword (miyamoto has to show off his memetic gimmicks), but it's fun nonetheless.

 

[RandomUser]

BUT HOW you connect the wii's sensor bar to pc??

You actually do not need the bar connected to a PC, all it is a few infrared LED. Nothing special about it. All you need to do is supply it with any power source just to power the LED.
Heck I bought an new PowerA branded UltraSensor Bar for the Wii U for $5. It features two option as a power source, Wired to the console or 4 AA batteries. Heck I think I may have a USB powered sensor bar somewhere, that looks like the official branded bar, the USB is just for power and nothing else, there is no data line on those USB cable.

 

[Deleted-379826]

Oh, really awesome! Was just looking into if this was possible a while ago. Could be really amazing for DolphinVR if it can be merged in with the existing builds of it. Since, sadly it isn't in development anymore.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I really thought this already was implemented like 8 years ago ...
As for the sensor bar i just turn on the Wii after pairing the controllers with the PC and you are good to go.

Thank you team Dolphin!

It was, actually. The first mention I saw of it was like 4 years ago, unofficially. Here's a link:

 

[t1op]

I am really glad that Dolphin has officially implemented Motion Plus. I think this is a great step toward making Motion Plus controls more accurate and more easily accessible.
The old unofficial build has some serious bugs in it, like motion controls getting haywire from repeated input, and axes returning to neutral or not returning to neutral when you don't want them to do so, and mouse controls acting erratic. This official build seems to be cleaning up the motion input, but hasn't completely resolved any of these issues. Hopefully, this feature will receive further development now that it's built into official releases.

For anyone familiar with older builds, Skyward Sword used Tilt controls only. No IR and no Swing. In the new official build, all three inputs are used. IR works well for aiming. Tilt left and right are necessary for flying. And Swing works best for Sword swinging.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the customization of these that is available falls short of the 12/2017 Jpeterson rebase build, that allows you to set gyro ranges so that you can decrease motion sensitivity adequately for precise aiming and flying. As such, I am still playing with that older build, until the similar modifications become available in the official build.

Personally, I don't like swinging my wiimote around to swing my sword... too slow, tiring. And it never felt like a 1:1 experience.
Unfortunately, any other way of playing the game requires a complex set of instructions to perform every action required in the game. 80-90% of the game is pretty straight forward, but 10-20% requires actions made specifically for the Wiimote and Nunchuck setup. I hope no one thinks they can play the game with a gamepad without learning to translate the normal controls into what is available and having a reference for how to do special motion stuff. There's no getting around it.

The one thing that could make things much simpler is if we could use a motion controller like the PS4 dualshock 4, to replicate most of the motion controls. In theory, this can be done by mapping the PS4 gyro as mouse or analog controls, but having tested them extensively and painfully, they don't really work with the current official and unofficial motion plus builds. Anytime you try to use the mouse or PS4 gyro the controls become erratic.

In short, Skyward Sword is not currently easy to play 100% with a gamepad. If you want easy and simple, you still need your wiimote. But, the official adoption of motion plus is still exciting because it is a big step toward that smooth gamepad experience that we really want

 

[Anfroid]

Thankfully I wont have to use an obscure release to play skyward sword like the first time I played through it

The pheripheral was

Go to sleep you're drunk.

 

[Deleted User]

BUT HOW you connect the wii's sensor bar to pc??

Actually you don't have to. I actually just sync my wiimote to my pc, turn on my wii, which powers the sensor bar, and then things work. The wiiremote is the thing actually sending position data, not the sensor bar surprisingly enough.

 

[RattletraPM]

It was, actually. The first mention I saw of it was like 4 years ago, unofficially. Here's a link:

Yup, the writeup on Dolphin's blog mentions it. It didn't get merged for... obvious reasons.

In fact, there's an old fork that has let users playMotionPlus titles since the Dolphin 3.0 days! Unfortunately, anyone who wondered why it was never merged into master would very quickly see why after they actually tried to use it. It was a user interface nightmare that required extremely careful configuration, constant profile swapping, and maticulous retooling of motions to even get past the menus in a game like Skyward Sword.

Go to sleep you're drunk.

Spoiler

Nah.

 

[ZipMartin]

That's very good news. I planned to buy a Wii Remote Plus some time ago just for this emulator, but I think there was some kind of compatibility issue and I'd have to be careful reading product IDs on the box before buying it. I wonder if the newer versions of Dolphin recognize just about any Wii Remote now...

 

[t1op]

I planned to buy a Wii Remote Plus some time ago just for this emulator, but I think there was some kind of compatibility issue

I tried to use one earlier this year and it did not work with Dolphin.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

That's very good news. I planned to buy a Wii Remote Plus some time ago just for this emulator, but I think there was some kind of compatibility issue and I'd have to be careful reading product IDs on the box before buying it. I wonder if the newer versions of Dolphin recognize just about any Wii Remote now...

I believe the issue with "new" Wiimotes is that not all bluetooth stacks work with them for some reason. So depending on what bluetooth adapter you're using, it may or may not work out of the box, and you can install another BT stack (the Toshiba one is supposed to work) in order to connect "new" Wiimotes on adapters that don't work with them out of the box. This isn't ideal though because it won't be a seamless experience, Motion Plus especially struggles with a lot of drifting and frequent recalibration, and the connecting and syncing may not work perfectly (I've experienced having to delete the paired controller in order to connect the Wiimote again as the sync does not seem to work as expected)
But you can work around these issues by using bluetooth passthrough, which in general works far more reliably, especially for Motion Plus games, and allows the syncing and connecting to work just like a real Wii.

Bluetooth passthrough should work with most (all?) BT adapters, it certainly works fine with the one integrated into my laptop, but some work slightly better than others in terms of how reliable the connection is, how accurate the motion controls are (especially with MotionPlus)/how quickly it drifts.
Sadly, it doesn't work with the DolphinBar (which was previously the preferred method of connecting Wiimotes to a PC), as that doeesn't act like a normal BT adapter, but with it, a DolphinBar is not needed since this works even better.

 

[sergiou87]

This is awesome! They're doing an impressive work!!

 

[gbadl]

Sad to hear that John Peterson didn't get any credit for his work into MPlus emulation back in 2011. Beat Skyward Sword using one of his builds in 2011 and Dolphin finally decides to implement this 8 years later.