Wii Controllers¶

Pair a Wii Remote, Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or Wii U Pro Controller over Bluetooth and map it like any other pad.

The Pair a Controller dialog scanning for a Wii controller

The Windows pairing wizard can't pair a Wii controller on its own. The controller's Bluetooth PIN isn't something you can type, and it changes with which sync method you use. PadForge runs the whole handshake through the Windows Bluetooth system, so you pair from inside the app.

Pairing a Wii controller¶

Open the Devices page.
Click Pair, next to Refresh. The Pair a Controller dialog opens.
Leave Controller Family on Nintendo Wii. The other entries pair a Sony DualShock 3 and a PlayStation Move / Navigation controller.
Click Pair in the dialog to start scanning. The Pair button dims and the progress ring spins.
Press the red SYNC button under the battery cover on the back of the controller.
The controller appears in the found list and pairs on its own. You don't select it.
On success, the Pair button disappears and Cancel becomes Done. Click Done to close.

Pressing SYNC bonds the controller. You pair once, and it reconnects on any button press afterward.

Temporary pairing¶

Check Temporary Pairing (Hold 1 and 2) before you scan, then hold the 1 and 2 buttons instead of pressing SYNC. This pairs for the current session only. It does not bond the controller, so you re-pair the next time.

Supported controllers¶

PadForge reads all four forms. Each maps as a normal pad on the Mappings tab.

Controller	Layout
Wii Remote / Wii Remote Plus	Seven buttons: A, B, 1, 2, +, -, and Home. The D-Pad maps as a single POV (hat), not four separate buttons. The remote has no face-button cluster.
Wii Remote + Nunchuk	The same buttons and D-Pad POV, plus the Nunchuk stick on Left X/Y, the C button on Left Shoulder, and the Z button on Left Trigger.
Classic Controller	Standard gamepad layout.
Wii U Pro Controller	Standard gamepad layout.

Attach or detach a Nunchuk while the remote stays connected and PadForge re-identifies the controller without a restart.

D-pad mapping¶

Every Wii controller's D-pad maps as a single POV hat. Older builds also listed the four D-pad directions as separate raw rows in the picker. Those raw rows are gone. A mapping made against an old raw D-pad row no longer fires, so re-record it onto the POV hat.

The hat turns with the remote's hold. Set Held As on the Gyro tab to one of the two sideways holds and the remote's physical Right reads as Up, so Up on the mapping table is up in the hold. See Holds.

Motion¶

The Wii Remote's accelerometer and the Wii Motion Plus gyro flow through the same sensor pipeline as any other motion pad. Gyro-to-mouse, gyro-to-stick, and motion mapping all work. See Gyro for calibration, sensitivity, and the engage controls.

A Nunchuk carries its own accelerometer. When one is attached, two more sources appear in the picker: Nunchuk Accelerometer and Nunchuk Lean. They read the Nunchuk's own tilt, separate from the remote's motion, so you can map each hand independently.

The Nunchuk accelerometer sources work over Remote Link too, so a Nunchuk shared from another PC exposes them just like a local one.

Holds¶

The driver delivers the remote's motion in the aiming frame only. Hold the remote sideways and every axis a game reads is a quarter turn off. The Grip card on the Gyro tab, row Held As, rotates the gyro, the accelerometer, and gravity into the frame of the hold you are using. It applies to the mapping rows, to the motion a Nintendo or PlayStation slot reports, and to the DSU Motion Server feed.

Held As	The hold
Pointing	Aimed at the screen, buttons up. The default.
Sideways, Face Up	The NES-style hold. Top edge left, buttons up.
Wii Wheel, Face Toward You	The wheel shell. Top edge left, buttons toward you.
Upright	Pointer at the ceiling, buttons toward you.

The two sideways holds differ only in which way the buttons face, and they need different rotations, so pick the one that matches. The D-pad turns with the grip in both sideways holds. Changing the hold recenters the motion neutrals, so hold the remote still for a moment afterward. The Nunchuk is its own body in the other hand and keeps its own frame.

Since 4.4.0 the Gyro tab shows for a remote without Motion Plus as well. On an accelerometer-only remote it carries the Grip, Motion Steering, and Gyro Tilt cards and hides the gyro-rate cards.

Emulators¶

Keep Apply Gyro Tuning to Motion Passthrough on the Gyro tab off. It is off by default. An emulator integrates the rate it receives, and with the box checked the tab's default tuning runs smoothing and a 3°/s deadzone on that rate first, which leaves the integrated orientation drifting after a tilt and wrong after a sharp turn. Details on Gyro.

The Motion Plus zero is calibrated when the remote connects. The scale is fixed in the driver, which reads no calibration block from the remote, so a fast turn can read a little short. See Wii Controllers Internals.

IR pointer¶

The Wii Remote's IR camera can drive an on-screen pointer. Point the remote at the screen and the camera tracks the sensor bar. Three mapping sources appear in the picker for a Wii Remote: IR Pointer X, IR Pointer Y, and IR Offscreen. They only show up when the assigned device is a Wii Remote.

Map IR Pointer X and IR Pointer Y to the right stick to aim, or to mouse motion to point the cursor at the screen.

IR Offscreen reads on when the camera loses sight of the sensor bar, so aiming off the screen registers as a press. Many lightgun games reload when you point off-screen, and this source drives that. It fits a button.

A Pointer tab appears when the assigned device has an IR camera. It holds two cards.

Pointer Mode¶

The Pointer Mode card sets how the aim drives the OS cursor. Pick one of four modes:

Mouse: the cursor follows where you point, one-to-one.
FPS Mouse: the offset from screen center becomes cursor velocity, for first-person games. This mode adds an FPS Speed slider (5 to 100, default 35) that sets cursor speed at full aim.
4:3 Border: confines the cursor to a 4:3 region and pins it to the edge when you aim past it.
16:9 Border: the same, for a 16:9 region.

The mode shapes the cursor only. IR Pointer X and IR Pointer Y mapped to a stick or button keep reading the raw aim.

The Pointer Mode card with the mode dropdown and the FPS Speed slider

Pointer tuning¶

The tuning card lines the pointer up with your screen:

Sensor Bar Position: Centered, Above the Screen, or Below the Screen. Set this to where your sensor bar actually sits so the pointer lines up.
Vertical Offset: shifts the pointer up or down to compensate for the bar's height.
Smoothing: steadies the pointer against camera jitter.

Each IR Pointer source row also has a Sensitivity dial, from 0.1 to 5.0.

The Pointer tab with sensor-bar position, vertical offset, smoothing, and per-source sensitivity

Balance Board¶

The Wii Balance Board pairs the same way as any other Wii controller and exposes three sources:

Balance Total Weight: the weight on the board, computed in real kilograms and scaled across a 0 to 150 kg range.
Balance Lean X: the left-right weight shift, as a ratio. No calibration needed.
Balance Lean Y: the front-back weight shift, as a ratio. No calibration needed.

The board's factory calibration is read automatically, so weight reads in real kilograms without setup. The weight zero-point (tare) is not adjustable in the app yet, so Balance Total Weight reads without a tare offset.

Balance Board sources in the mapping picker

Speaker¶

A Wii Remote can play macro sounds through its built-in speaker. The speaker is low-rate audio, so it handles beeps and short cues rather than music. It appears on the Audio tab like other speaker-capable controllers.

Left Joy-Con motion¶

A combined Joy-Con pair carries a full motion sensor in each half. On a pair the plain Gyro Pitch / Yaw / Roll / Horizontal rows read both halves fused: each half is debiased against its own measured bias, then the two rates are averaged. The Motion Gyro passthrough row is never fused and reads the right half raw, because the passthrough has to stay a single real sensor stream. Each half also gets its own explicit rows, offered only on a pair:

Source	Reads
Left Joy-Con Gyro Pitch, Left Joy-Con Gyro Yaw, Left Joy-Con Gyro Roll, Left Joy-Con Gyro Horizontal (Yaw + Roll)	The left half's rotation rate, raw, one row per axis. Bind them to mouse or stick axes like the plain gyro axes.
Right Joy-Con Gyro Pitch, Right Joy-Con Gyro Yaw, Right Joy-Con Gyro Roll, Right Joy-Con Gyro Horizontal (Yaw + Roll)	The right half's rotation rate, raw, which is what the plain rows read before fusion.
Left Joy-Con Motion Gyro	The left half's full gyro stream to the virtual controller's motion gyro output, in place of the right half's.
Left Joy-Con Accelerometer	The left half's full accelerometer stream to the virtual controller's motion accelerometer output.
Left Joy-Con Lean	The left half's tilt, for motion steering or any axis row.

The two hands read independently, so the left half can drive the cursor while the right half's gyro aims a stick.

Left Joy-Con Accelerometer and Left Joy-Con Lean are the same two sources that show as Nunchuk Accelerometer and Nunchuk Lean on a Wii Remote. The gyro rows have no Nunchuk counterpart. The Nunchuk carries no gyro.

Joy-Con 2 pairs expose the same left-side sources.
The left sensor runs through the same pipeline as the primary one. The sensitivity, response shaping, and engage controls on the Gyro tab all apply, and those device-level sliders tune both halves at once. The per-row Sensitivity dial is the independent knob.
Gyro calibration samples both halves in one run and stores a separate bias for each, so hold both halves still.
The Devices page shows the left half's readings as Aux Gyroscope and Aux Accelerometer telemetry blocks.
The left-side sources work over Remote Link, like the Nunchuk pair.

One slot for every Joy-Con grip¶

A Joy-Con set shows up as three separate devices over its lifetime: the combined pair, the left half alone, and the right half alone. Assignments are per device and persist while a device is offline, so you can assign all three to the same virtual controller slot, each with mappings that fit its grip (sideways single, upright pair). Whichever identity is currently connected feeds the slot. Splitting the pair or rejoining it switches mapping sets on its own, with nothing to reconfigure.

For a sideways single Joy-Con, build the half's mapping set with the grip rotated in mind. On a sideways left Joy-Con, stick up points right, so map the stick's physical Y axis to the virtual left stick's X and the physical X axis to Y (invert to taste with each row's Invert toggle), put SL and SR on the bumpers, and use the face of the D-pad as the four action buttons. The right half mirrors this with the opposite rotation. Save each grip as its own profile, or put the alternate grip behind a shift layer to switch hold modes live without touching the device list.

Joy-Con IR brightness¶

The right Joy-Con's IR camera reports a single brightness value, exposed as a source called IR Brightness. Cover the sensor and it reads bright. Uncover it and it reads dark. It works on the standalone right Joy-Con and on a combined pair, where the right half's camera feeds the source, so a split-pair grip can use the cover gesture too. The left Joy-Con alone does not have it, and neither does a Joy-Con 2 (its inner edge carries the optical mouse instead).

Map it three ways:

To a button, using the row's threshold, so covering the sensor counts as a press.
To a trigger, for an analog value.
To a stick axis.

IR Brightness source in the mapping picker

Joy-Con 2 optical mouse¶

A Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con has an optical mouse sensor on its inner edge, the flat side that clips onto the console. Stand the Joy-Con on that edge and slide it across a surface, and it drives two sources, Mouse Motion X and Mouse Motion Y. Either half works, left or right, as a standalone Joy-Con 2. A combined Joy-Con 2 pair does not expose the sensor, so split the pair to use it.

Map them to:

A stick, for mouse-look.
A button, using the row's Invert direction, the Half and Bidirectional options, and a threshold.
Horizontal or vertical scroll.

Each Mouse Motion row has a Sensitivity dial. This needs PadForge's bundled controller library build that exposes the sensor.

Mouse Motion sources in the mapping picker

Requirements¶

A Bluetooth radio. The Wii controller connects over Bluetooth, so the PC needs a working adapter.
PadForge runs elevated. The Windows Bluetooth stack writes the link key itself, so nothing touches the registry.

Devices: the Pair button and the paired controller's device card.
Gyro: tune the Wii Remote's motion sensors and set the hold.
Wii Controllers Internals: the pairing ceremony, the sensor frame, and the Motion Plus calibration limitation.
Driver Management: HIDMaestro and HidHide driver setup.

Last updated for PadForge 4.5.0.