Game porter and Steam Play dev Ethan Lee is running a crowdfunding campaign

Nintendo's USB GameCube adapter for the Wii U and Switch could soon work on Linux, Mac and Windows if this crowdfunding campaign from Ethan Lee is a success.

Ethan Lee should be a well-known name to most of our readers, they're responsible for a ridiculous amount of indie games that were ported to Linux (see here). On top of that, they're also now working on Steam Play (Valve's fork of Wine that's integrated with the Steam client on Linux) with Codeweavers and Valve too.

Here's the simple version of what they're planning to do if they get the funding:

I would like to improve support for Nintendo's USB GameCube controller adapter on Windows/macOS/Linux. You may know it as the Wii U GameCube Adapter, or the Nintendo Switch GameCube Adapter. I will do this by adding a special backend to SDL, via their HIDAPI-based joystick driver.

Right now there only exist platform-specific standalone programs that make virtual joysticks (such as wii-u-gc-adapter), or programs are writing low-level device support themselves (such as Dolphin's built-in GameCube adapter support). By writing a driver in SDL, we introduce out-of-the-box support to an extremely large catalog of existing software for every major desktop platform without having to develop a driver for each one individually (some of which require expensive certificates and/or certification processes, in addition to having to install it for each user).

The campaign, now live on IndieGoGo has a small goal of only $1,500. They're not expecting it to take too long, with an estimation of around three weekends worth of work to get the bulk of it done.

The more we get working out of the box, the better. Hopefully the campaign will go well.