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First Step In DS Wifi Challenge Complete

Posted by Zonk on from the towards-a-better-bounty dept.

josath writes "The DS Wifi Bounty Milestone 1 has been completed! (previously on /.) The hardware registers to use the wifi built into the Nintendo DS has been documented. This is a huge step, as this was done with absolutely no documentation on the hardware. Stephen Stair has received ~$1400 for this milestone, and is working towards getting the other half by creating a tcp/ip stack. Once a TCP/IP stack is implemented on top of the hardware layer, homebrew NDS developers can start using the wifi in their own apps/games! This comes before Nintendo has officially released any wifi-capable games."

6 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For all of you that don't know exactly *why* he did this.
    Sgstair has reversed some of the present apps and games that use the wifi capability of the DS in order to get a working homebrew tcp/ip for the community's usage. Nintendo has their own wifi code they they will be using with their games (mario kart, animal crossing, etc) which are due to be released shortly.

  2. Re:well? by TheStick · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nintendo uses a proprietary protocol called NiFi, which is different from WiFi (802.11x). But Software's the difference. Future Nintendo games will use Wi-Fi (that is, 802.11b) instead of NiFi. Why? Because you can't connect to a standard router with NiFi, only to another DS. So to play games (such as the upcoming Mario Kart and Animal Crossing) over the internet, the DS needs to use NiFi. The article, however, is about a home-made (unofficial) wi-fi implementation that will certainly be used by DSlinux and such programs.

  3. Re:well? by TheStick · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sorry, I made a mistake, you should read "So to play games (such as the upcoming Mario Kart and Animal Crossing) over the internet, the DS needs to use WiFi"

  4. A bunch of URLs... by aliquis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some random urls:
    teh skeen
    ds dev
    supercard (can't find the M3 and G6 pages longer)
    wifime
    some info about m3
    Emulators for NDS
    whatever

  5. Ni-Fi is like IPX or NetBEUI by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    Then someone said that current games use NiFi, but that didn't help much.

    "Wi-Fi" is a certification mark for products using IEEE 802.11b, a layer 2 protocol; all multiplayer Nintendo DS games use 802.11b. "Ni-Fi" is the name used by gaming journalism and the DS homebrew community for the non-routable layer 3 protocol that current Nintendo DS games use for wireless communication, as opposed to IPv4. Substitute "IPX" or "NetBEUI" wherever you see "Ni-Fi" and see if things make more sense.

    There's still the question as to why it matters that N isn't using WiFi (yet) when they have released wireless games.

    Games that don't use IPv4 won't be able to communicate over a network that uses IPv4 for routing.

  6. Re:took FOREVER by stonecypher · · Score: 3, Informative

    Three months, actually. The bounty was started in late July. Besides, people have day jobs. The IM clients should be relatively trivial, a port of KHTML would be a few hundred hours, nobody's even vaguely interested in it as a media player, though companies like g6 have had that running since almost month one.

    --
    StoneCypher is Full of BS