Hacking The DS's Wireless

xNoLaNx writes "Darkain, maker of the remote control program for Winamp, RM-X, has been working day and night hacking the Nintendo DS and its wireless, and making a custom USB power connection for it. He has been able to monitor packets over 802.11b coming from PictoChat and more."

Clue for the clueless?

[fembots]

I remember when I was playing King Quest in 80's, when the king has to go to this wizard place to learn some magic. I had to resort to opening up the binary files and read some command lines to know what to do and what to pick up. I didn't have too much luck with Police Quest though, since it's more of an action-based game :)

So now with these decoded Mario64 packets, we know to wait for yoshi in the middle of kira spa, room 1?

Other than that, I don't know what is the use of these decoded packets.

The USB power cable is cool, if not for the fact that we already can buy USB-powered XMas tree, desk fan and whatnot.

Re:more free games

[Anonymous Coward]

Look it up [urbandictionary.com]

Ds is gonna have so many hacks

[Cracell]

I don't have one yet, but from looking at it, it appears very hackable, which will be nice once I get the cash for one I expect this to be the first of many

Re:DS as general-purpose internet client

[MBCook]

I wouldn't be suprised if someone sold that, but the screens are under 300x200 each. Great for games, but not much for web surfing.

Re:DS usb power cable

[darkain]

yes, they can use the same power cable. yes, you can buy pre-made cables from lik-sang. the one on the site mentioned above is actually a SP cable, not a DS cable, but the mod was done for the purpose of using it on the DS. some people out there have purchased the SP and the DS, and therefor would have two power adapters. instead of having two of the same thing, this could give you a variety of mothods for powering your units, such as gathering friends together in one small location where power outlets become scarce, and because of the akward shape of the power adapter, it will can cover 2 or more outlets on a power strip. using usb instead means you can use any free usb slot available on your desktop computer, laptop, or powered usb hub.

USB Gameboy/DS power cables

[IroygbivU]

For those of you without the equipment to make your own, you can buy them quite cheaply from a Hong Kong importer called Lik Sang. http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=278&prod ucts_id=2994& [lik-sang.com]

Re:Wake-On-LAN

[juuri]

Wake on Lan isn't in the US version and Nintendo has no current plans to add it to future US units.

Hopefully this can be rectified with a firmware patch included in some popular games in the future.

you don't need AiroPeek NX, free software works

[chizu]

I've been doing most of the same stuff as Darkain has, but under Linux using all free software. Ethereal/tcpdump doesn't keep the raw 802.11b packets needed to see all of the DS data, but AirSnort does. AirSnort will record to pcap format and then you can mess with the packets in Ethereal. Just a heads up for those who don't want to pay for AiroPeek and still want to mess with low level wireless stuff (like the Nintendo DS).

Re:DS as general-purpose internet client

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it was a joke, but the original gameboy actually does have a PIM "game" that was released in Japan. I don't remember details (name, company), unfortunately, but I do remember firing it up on an emulator and thinking about how useful it would be on a real GB...and how useless it was on my desktop.

Re:gcc toolchain?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, DevKitARM [sourceforge.net] has compilers for GBA and GP32 development already. Considering that the GBA uses an ARM7 CPU, and the GP32 uses an ARM9, and both CPUs are present in the DS, it would just take a little reverse engineering and writing libraries compatible with the DS hardware to make an easy-to-use development setup for the DS.

Unfortunately, this info will probably get overlooked since I'm posting AC. But, I moderated in this story, so I don't have much choice.