Yuzu: Using a phone to emulate motion controls

Jan 3, 2022

Emulating Switch games but can’t get your Joy-Cons to connect to your computer? Without other such controllers, you might be unable to use motion controls.

Fortunately, if you’re using Yuzu, you can use your phone to handle motion controls. In my experience, this is somewhat janky but relatively usable.

1. Download and run WebGyroForCemuhook

WebGyroForCemuhook uses ondevicemotion data to provide the gyroscopic data for a UDP-based, Cemuhook-compatible motion server.

The README for this project already provides instructions on how to download run it, but I’ll describe how to use it anyways.

If you’re on Windows, WebGyroForCemuhook provides a Gyro.exe executable for you to use.

If you’re running Linux (as I am), you can install Node.js and use that to run the project.

After installing Node.js, the following commands should work:

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git clone https://github.com/hjmmc/WebGyroForCemuhook
cd WebGyroForCemuhook
npm install
npm start

Now that you have WebGyroForCemuhook running, you need to connect your phone to the project’s browser front-end. You can do this by pointing your phone’s browser to https://your-pc-ip-ip.xip.lhjmmc.cn:8443 (for example, https://192-168-1-100.xip.lhjmmc.cn:8443).

If you’re using an iPhone and have iOS 13+, you may need to click an "allow permission" button to use the phone’s gyroscope.

2. Test the Cemuhook server on Yuzu

To test if WebGyroForCemuhook’s UDP server is working properly, go to Emulation > Configure > Controls and then click the Configure button under Motion.

motion configure

From here, you can click the Test button without adding any additonal servers, as the pre-existing server address and port is used by default in WebGyroForCemuhook.

test button

If the server is working correctly, then you should see a pop-up window saying "Successfully received data from the server."

successful data

3. Enable the motion controls on Yuzu

Now that Yuzu is able to receive input from the UDP server, it might seem like our work is done. However, we still need to configure the controls to actually use the gyroscopic info from the UDP server.

To do this, click on the "[not set]" controls button for your relevant motion. For the Pro Controller, this would be the button for Motion 1.

motion configure

The button’s text should change to say something like "Shake!".

shake

While the button’s text says "Shake!", you should then shake your phone. If everything works correctly, the button should now read "cemuhookudp" or something similar.

cemuhook

At this point, you should be ready to use your phone for motion controls.