You Can Now Use Your Old GameCube Controllers With SDL2 Games

Linux game porter Ethan Lee has taken a break from his FNA-XNA/FAudio/Wine hacking to add support to the SDL2 library for the GameCube controller adapter intended for Nintendo's Wii U / Switch devices.

Nintendo's adapter allows for old GameCube controllers to be used with the Wii U and Switch platforms, since the old GameCube Controllers do not offer a USB connection. Or now thanks to this support within SDL2, the GameCube Controllers can be enjoyed for some Linux gaming in SDL2-using titles.

This ended up being more involved than the simple additions required to add most controllers to SDL2. Ethan noted in the commit that was merged this week, "Note that a single USB device is responsible for all 4 joysticks, so a large rewrite of the DeviceDriver functions was necessary to allow a single device to produce multiple joysticks."

That in turn meant hundreds of lines of code being reworked within SDL2 for supporting the adapter to bring-up the GameCube controller support within SDL's HIDAPI code.