Connecting the Wiimote to Scratch on Windows 7

[Ed King]

Hi everyone.

At the CoderDojo today, we did a demonstration of how to connect the
Nintendo Wii Remote to a Laptop or PC and then use it to control a
Scratch Game.

The software used to connect the Wiimote is called GlovePIE, and is
free to download from:

http://glovepie.org/GlovePIE045Free.zip

The latest version on the download site is 0.45. Unfortunately if this
version is downloaded to a Windows 7 machine it won't run.
It gives an error message about a file called d3dx9_33.dll being
missing.
This is a DirectX 9 dll file. The version of DirectX on Windows 7 is
version 11, and even if DirectX 9 is downloaded from the Microsoft
website it probably can't be installed on a Windows 7 machine.

Version 0.45 works ok on a Windows XP machine with DirectX 9
installed.

The easiest way around this problem is to download and install the
previous version of GlovePIE, which is version 0.43. This is available
at the following link:

http://glovepie.org/GlovePIEWithEmotiv043.zip

I tried this version on a Windows 7 (32-bit) machine this evening and
it works fine.
It contains a non-Microsoft version of a DirectX 8 dll file in the
same folder as the GlovePIE executable so there are no problems with
missing dll files.

Please pass this information on to any CoderDojo members who are
having problems with GlovePIE on Windows 7 or on Windows XP without
DirectX 9 installed.

NOTE: Version 0.45 has more Wiimote scripts than version 0.43, so
these scripts can be copied from the folder on the 0.45 version to the
WiimoteScripts folder on the 0.43 version.


Regards,

Ed King.