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ndeadly / MissionControl

Use controllers from other consoles natively on your Nintendo Switch via Bluetooth. No dongles or other external hardware neccessary.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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atmosphere bluetooth cfw controller gamepad gaming nintendo-switch sysmodule

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Mission Control

Use controllers from other consoles natively on your Nintendo Switch via Bluetooth. No dongles or other external hardware neccessary.

Features

Supported Controllers

Currently, the following controllers are supported. If you have a third-party variant of one of the below, or a Bluetooth controller that isn't listed, consider submitting a controller request issue.

*Not all Xbox One wireless controllers support Bluetooth. Older variants use a proprietary 2.4Ghz protocol and cannot be used with the Switch. See here for information on identifying the Bluetooth variant.

Requirements

Installation

Download the latest release .zip and extract to the root of your SD card, allowing the folders to merge and overwriting any existing files. Reboot your console to activate the module and you're done!

IMPORTANT: Atmosphère >= 1.7.1 is required to run the latest release of Mission Control on firmware 18.1.0. Using an older Atmosphère version will cause Mission Control to crash or freeze the system on boot.

Usage

Mission Control is primarily a sysmodule (background process) that gets loaded by Atmosphère at boot time and runs indefinitely alongside the rest of the operating system. It enables the use of unsupported Bluetooth controllers as if they were native Pro Controllers. This means that you can pair and configure new controllers via Nintendo's own system menus, without the need to load additional homebrew applications. There is (currently) no Mission Control "app" to be opened.

Controllers must first be paired with the console (see below) before they can be used. Once paired, controllers will seek out and reconnect to the console automatically when woken up. There is no need to re-pair them every time. Note that unofficial controllers cannot be used to wake the console.

Once connected, your controller's buttons are mapped as closely as possible to the physical layout of a Switch Pro Controller. This means that A/B and X/Y buttons will be swapped for controllers that use an Xbox style button layout rather than using what is printed on the button. The button combos MINUS + DPAD_UP and MINUS + DPAD_DOWN are provided for all controllers to function as an alternative for CAPTURE and HOME buttons in cases where there are not enough face buttons available. Button mappings can be changed from the official system menu at System Settings->Controllers and Sensors->Change Button Mapping.

Most other native features should just work (with the exception of things like firmware update). If you find something that's broken please open a support issue on this github page.

Pairing Controllers

Nintendo made some rather confusing naming choices with their controller menu items. Controllers are paired from the system menu under Controllers->Change Grip/Order, and not Pairing New Controllers or Search for Controllers as common sense may lead you to expect. On this screen, place your controller into pairing mode (see below) and wait a few seconds. If successful, you should see a Paired notification show in the top left of the screen. Your controller is now paired and can be reconnected at any time without having to re-enter this screen. Re-pairing is only required if you have connected the controller to another device or emummc.

The supported controllers each have their own methods for entering pairing/sync mode. Below are instructions on entering this mode for some of the common console controllers.

Nintendo Wii/WiiU Controllers Press the red sync button on the back of the controller. The controller LEDs will blink rapidly.

It is recommended that you perform an analog stick calibration for these controller types where applicable, as every controller has different analog stick range and center position but unlike Switch controllers, there is no stored factory calibration.

Sony Dualshock3 Controller To pair this controller, you will need to connect it to the console via USB cable. Once the controller LEDs start flashing, disconnect the USB cable and hit the PS button.

Note: to avoid unwanted behaviour if using the controller in USB wired mode, this only works from the usual Controllers->Change Grip/Order screen.

Sony Dualshock4/Dualsense Controllers Press and hold the PS + share buttons simultaneously until the lightbar starts blinking. When done correctly the blink pattern will resemble a heartbeat, otherwise it will blink on and off at a constant rate.

If you have difficulty getting the controller to pair to the console, press and hold the reset button on the back of the controller for a few seconds and try again. Sometimes this is required after having connected to a Playstation console or other device.

Microsoft Xbox One/Elite 2 Controllers Press and hold the guide(X) button until the LED starts blinking. Then press and hold the small sync button on the back near the charging port until the LED starts blinking more rapidly.

Note: controller firmware versions 5.xx.xxxx.x and upward use Bluetooth Low Energy and are not currently supported. Please refer to the FAQ for instructions on downgrading to a compatible firmware

Other Controllers Please refer to your controller's user manual for information on how to put it into sync mode. Note that many generic Bluetooth controllers can be started in one of several modes. Usually you want to choose something like HID, PC or Android mode for it to work correctly.

Controllers that successfully pair but haven't been officially supported yet will display with red buttons on the Controllers menu to indicate their controls are not being mapped. Please open an issue to request support for such controllers.

Module configuration

A template for the config .ini file will be installed to /config/MissionControl/missioncontrol.ini.template. To modify the default module settings, copy the template to /config/MissionControl/missioncontrol.ini and uncomment (remove the leading ;) and modify any settings you want to change. The file is only parsed on startup, so any changes you make will require a reboot to take effect. Settings entries that can't be parsed/validated correctly are ignored. Currently there is only a small set of configuration settings, but this will be expanded upon in future releases.

Removal

To functionally uninstall Mission Control and its components, all that needs to be done is to delete the following directories from your SD card and reboot your console.

If you wish to completely remove all traces of the software ever having been installed (telemetry excepted), you may also want to follow these additional steps

Planned/In-progress Features

Below is a list of features I am currently working on or would like to look into in the future, roughly in descending order of priority. Requests are welcome if you have an idea you think would make a useful feature.

Known Issues and Limitations

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this run on \<insert CFW here>? No. Mission Control will only run under Atmosphère. This is not some attempt to lock out users of other CFW, Atmosphere is simply the only one providing the extensions neccessary to MITM Bluetooth communications that make this sysmodule possible.

Will using this get me banned from online? Currently there haven't been any confirmed cases of bans as a result of running Mission Control. That said, running any unofficial software under CFW will always carry a non-zero risk of ban, and Nintendo could change their ban criteria at any point. While Mission Control should be relatively safe, as it simply emulates a Pro Controller being connected, it would certainly be possible to detect that you had connected unofficial controllers to the console if Nintendo were interested in doing so. Use at your own discretion.

Does this support USB controllers? No, Mission Control is currently Bluetooth-only. For now you can use cathery's sys-con for USB controllers.

Does this work with sys-con installed? Yes, the two can be run simultaneously without issue.

My console is crashing on boot because of this sysmodule. What can I do? If you're seeing crashes on boot with Mission Control's title ID (010000000000bd00), it is likely either you have updated recently to a new Atmosphere release and an update to Mission Control is required, or you are running an old version of Atmosphere which is not compatible with the latest version of Mission Control. Crashes in sm (title ID 0100000000000004) can indicate version incompatibilities between your current Atmosphere and one or more of your homebrew sysmodules. This may be caused by Mission Control, or it could be another custom sysmodule that uses libstratosphere, even if it looks as though Mission Control is to blame (ldn_mitm and emuiibo are common offenders). If you've just updated Atmosphere you should always check if there have also been updates released for the sysmodules you use. qlaunch errors (title ID 0100000000001000) can be a sign that you have too many custom sysmodules running and are depleting the limited system resources available to them. Check your /atmosphere/contents folder and verify you actually need everything in there. If you don't know what you're doing, it may be easier to just delete this folder entirely, reinstall atmosphere, and then explicitly reinstall only the sysmodules you need.

I installed Mission Control but it doesn't do anything. Help! Mission Control is primarily a background process. There are no visual changes to your system to indicate it's installed other than your controller successfully connecting through Nintendo's official menus. If you've followed the Usage and Pairing instructions above and you can't make it work, here's a basic troubleshooting checklist.

How can I use this with multiple sysNAND/emuMMC launch configs? Pairing controllers across multiple unique HOS installations requires multiple pairing databases and is essentially the same as pairing with two different consoles. The only exception being the case where you paired the controller(s) prior to making sysNAND copies. For now you will have to re-pair your controllers when switching back and forth. In the future I hope to include an option to load/store the database on the SD card to avoid this issue. Since version 1.5.1, Atmosphere now contains code I contributed to synchronise the bluetooth pairing database between sysNAND and emuMMC via a file on the sd card. This can be activated by adding enable_external_bluetooth_db = u8!0x1 under the [atmosphere] section in atmosphere/config/system_settings.ini. Note: this feature requires atmosphere to be running in order to function. As such, it cannot be used to synchronise sysCFW/emuMMC with stock/OFW.

Can I remap controller buttons using Mission Control? Yes. Since Mission Control emulates official Pro Controllers, you can remap them using the official method introduced by Nintendo in firmware 10.0.0. You can find the remapping options in the system menu under System Settings->Controllers and Sensors->Change Button Mapping.

My console shows a "Paired" notification but my controller doesn't connect, what's wrong? Your controller has successfully paired with the console but is being disconnected shortly after, before it can start sending inputs. This can happen for a variety of reasons, the most common being:

My Xbox controller won't connect, I thought you said they were supported? Although they may look similar, not all Xbox controllers are created equal. There are actually several hardware revisions/models available (7 at the time of writing) with varying wireless capabilites. On Xbox consoles (or PC with the wireless USB adapter) all controllers use a proprietary Microsoft wireless protocol known as GIP. Bluetooth connectivity, however, is not the same thing and varies between controller models. Some support bluetooth, and some don't. Of those that do, some are using the newer (currently unsupported) Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) standard or will switch to it after a firmware update. The only supported models are the 1708 (Xbox One S) and 1797 (Xbox Elite V2) revisions. If these have been updated to a Bluetooth LE firmware (5.xx.xxxx.x and above), you will need to downgrade the firmware to the legacy version (see below).. Controller model numbers can be found on the inside of the battery compartment, or the back of the controller in controllers with an internal battery.

For more details on the various controller revisions (with images), see here.

My Xbox One/Elite V2 controller used to connect and now it doesn't, what gives? As of late 2021, Microsoft introduced a new controller firmware that aims to bring Xbox One/Elite 2 controllers in line with the newer Series X|S controllers. Updating to this firmware switches the controller over to using Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), a newer bluetooth standard focused on low power consumption, which is not currently supported by Mission Control. If your controller firmware is version 5.xx.xxxx.x or above, you have the new LE firmware and will need to downgrade to the legacy one (see https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/accessories/controller-firmware-reversion)

Can you add support for Xbox 360 controllers? No, not currently. These don't use Bluetooth. Try sys-con with a wireless USB adapter.

Can you add support for wake from sleep? Probably not. As far as I know, wake from sleep involves a controller sending a special control command to the Switch Bluetooth hardware. There is no way to make a non-switch controller send the command recognised by the Switch without modifying its hardware/firmware.

Can you add bluetooth audio support? No. The bluetooth module on the switch only implements a small set of services required to make hid controllers work. Of this small set of services, only a handful of high-level functions are exposed to the rest of the system. Adding audio support would require implementing the services neccessary for audio transport, for which any sane person would require an open-source re-implementation of the bluetooth module in order to have access the low-level functions required to pull it off. As of firmware 12.0.0 Nintendo have added functions supporting Bluetooth audio. While the feature hasn't been enabled in official software, plutooo has created an experimental sysmodule called nx-btred that enables Bluetooth audio in games that support recording. There isn't much benefit to me adding its functionality to Mission Control. Since firmware 13.0.0 Nintendo now officially supports Bluetooth audio.

My controller has an audio jack, can you add headset support? Unlikely. As far as I know, controllers supporting headset audio do so via proprietary or non-standard means. This would be a lot of work, not only to understand how it works for a particular controller, but also to integrate it into HOS somehow when it has no concept of a gamepad supporting audio. In the best-case event a controller was using some form of standard Bluetooth audio, you would still be subject to the usual bandwidth constraints of the console (choppy audio, laggy controller inputs etc). Just use regular headphones.

How it works

Mission Control works by Man-In-The-Middling the bluetooth system module and intercepting its initialisation IPC commands and system events, and translating incoming/outgoing data to convince the Switch that it's communicating with an official Pro Controller.

To achieve this, the btdrv.mitm module obtains the handles to bluetooth system events and shared memory when the system attempts to initialise them over IPC via the btm and hid modules. It then creates its own secondary versions of these and passes their handles on instead of the original. This allows modifications to be made to any data buffers before notifying (or not) the system. Additionally, the WriteHidData IPC command is intercepted to translate or drop outgoing requests to the controller. In the case of the latter, fake responses can be written directly to the buffer in shared memory.

Intercepting initialisation IPC commands also allows homebrew to properly make use of the bluetooth service. Normally, calling any of the IPC commands that would initialise or finalise system events would either crash the console, or invalidate the event handles held by system processes. With btdrv.mitm we are able to hand out alternative event handles when homebrew attempts to initialise an interface, and redirect the real system events to those instead of the events held by system processes.

exefs patches to the bluetooth module are provided to enable the pairing of Wii/WiiU and other controllers that makes use of legacy pincode pairing, Xbox Elite 2 Wireless controllers, and to relax device class checks added on newer firmwares to also allow devices identifying as keyboard or joystick to be connected.

exefs patches to the btm module have been added to skip over calls to nn::bluetooth::hal::CloseHidConnection when a controller fails to respond correctly to the broadcom vendor command sent by nn::bluetooth::hal::SetTsi. This prevents all affected controllers from being disconnected immediately after connection, and eliminates the need to manually flag certain controllers with a settsi_disable.flag file.

The btm service is now also MITM'd, allowing for faking controller names on the fly while retaining the original names in the pairing database.

Building from source

First, clone the repository to your local machine and switch to the newly cloned directory

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl.git
cd MissionControl

Mission Control currently uses a custom fork of libnx that adds Bluetooth service wrappers and type definitions. Official libnx master is now used to build Mission Control. At the time of writing, the libnx distributed by devkitPro can be used without the need to build it yourself. This may change if Atmosphere-libs updates to use bleeding edge libnx commits not present in the official release. In any case, you can build the included libnx submodule from source with the following commands.

cd lib/libnx
make && make install

Next build libstratosphere. If you encounter any build errors, you may be missing required dependencies (refer to https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/blob/master/docs/building.md)

cd ../Atmosphere-libs/libstratosphere
make

Finally, build and package the distribution .zip. This will build the mc.mitm sysmodule and package it up with bluetooth exefs patches. 

cd ../..
make dist

The resulting package can be installed as described above.

Credits

Support

If you like this project, please consider supporting me to continue its development :)

ko-fi