One of the oldest complaints about Dolphin's Real Wiimote support is that Wiimote audio not only sounds extremely bad, but can outright lag the controls and even cause the Wiimotes to disconnect from your PC. To work around these problems, the developers did the only thing they knew to do; implement "Disable Wiimote Speaker Data." This ended up being one of the most important features for many users to be able to use Real Wiimotes in Dolphin, as dozens of games suffered constant disconnects due to audio issues.

Firing Starbits with Speaker Data Enabled on older builds.

The situation remained unchanged for year after year until just a few days ago, when newcomer Julian Loehr renovated Dolphin's Wiimote handling to take advantage of the improvements within the Windows 8/10 Bluetooth Stack. Not only do -TR Wiimotes work without special hardware, but on all configurations Wiimote Audio started working on those Wiimotes. Further investigation by degasus thanks to a timely regression the very next build brought us something unimaginable: fully working RealWiimote audio!

There are some limitations to this, unfortunately. Currently, only -TR Wiimotes have working Wiimote audio. Older Wii Remotes behave mostly the same as before and struggle to output any kind of recognizable audio. Secondly, Wiimote audio does not like inconsistent speed. Turning off the framelimiter will break Wiimote audio, as well as prolonged stretches of slowdown. Usually hitting the home button twice will straighten things out, but, it's worth noting that these limitations exist. It makes sense, though, it's not like a Real Wiimote would expect a Wii to be going at 6x speed! Lastly, the quality of a Bluetooth adapter does matter. In our testing, a more expensive Bluetooth adapter (~$20) outperformed a cheap Bluetooth adapter ($5) and DolphinBar in audio quality and latency.

As always, these fixes can be found in the latest development builds. After the month rolls on by, we'll go into more detail on the changes in the December Dolphin Progress Report. Until then, please have a happy and safe holiday season!

Clarification: -TR Wiimotes are official Nintendo Wiimotes with Motion Plus integrated and are the only official Wiimotes currently made and sold by Nintendo.