I am working on some wiimote powered flash games, been looking forward to this for awhile. I recently got a Samsung NC1 Netbook, it comes with Widcomm drivers and Windows XP Home, which work with the following caveats. Getting one working was very easy, the second for whatever reason is PITA. After hours of headbanging following this protocol I can reliably connect and reconnect 2 wiimotes. 4 are probably possible with the same approach.
Instructions
1) ever time you want to connect you have to go through the steps of "add device" and discovery...you'll have to have the back off the wii for this, the little red button. Kinda annoying but better than nothing.
2) In the device discovery. Don't pair the devices, it's not possible, just hit skip on that step.
3) IMPORTANT: when you want to stop using them, before powering them down, go to the Bluetooth Devices in the Bluetooth neighborhood, right click and disable both of them, if you don't the thing will haunt your registry and be the undead in the neighborhood...it's impossible to kill.
4) ignore the "Bluetooth Devices" in the Bluetooth neighborhood, they lie.
5) try not to leave the batteries in for a month, they will die. Using a recharger makes more sense.
6) if you use the wiimote as a mouse (an option in the WiiFlash server) you will need the sensor bar, or other suitable IR source (candle, incandescent lamp). else you may have a hard time getting your mouse back! The sensor bar too runs on batteries so should be shut off (shame there's not a usb powered sensor bar).
If you get stuck in 3 and are comfortable editing your registry. end up in a case where you can't disable the 'device shortcut', right click open up it's properties and find the device code a rather random looking number of letter numbers and colons. Open up start>run>regedit . Search for that code and you should see it under a devices folder with 1-3 folders beneath it. This is not undoable. Delete the node with the same id and all beneath it. This will release the lock, which apparently holds onto the state.
Though not insurmountable, relative to the ease they work on the wii console, this is a deal breaker for me for having entry level consumers use the device with laptops but the amount of still fun once things are setup. It's cool to have a PC as a game console of sorts (netbooks are so small and great for casual games) aslo there are many cool whiteboard like apps that devices like these can be used with and netbooks are cheap, small and relatively low power appliances.
It may be possible to use a different stack with a bit more success, but so far I haven't been able to find any compatible. But here's a link that might help.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Bluetooth crapperies are indeed something to rant about, I’ve been there. For a project of mine I did some research into different bluetooth stacks and imho I’ve found the Toshiba stack (ie. this is the underlying software driving your bluetooth adapter) to be the most stable and reliable. Only problem is that you can’t have two BT stacks working at the same time so you’d have to override the native Widcomm stack of your laptop if you were to use a bluetooth stick with the Toshiba stack.