As of today the DS and Wii wifi services are no more. If you wanted to play online games though all is not lost, read on for pointers on how to do it.
The once popular Gamespy service announced its shutdown a few months back, Nintendo had used the service for a lot of their DS and Wii games and with the demise of Gamespy came the shutdown of servers for a lot of DS and Wii titles. Nintendo was certainly not the only casualty in this but the Wii and DS represented Nintendo's first real forays into modern online gaming, this meant the sting was that little bit harsher for many.
With the DS and Wii being totally owned as far as user code went, no bans really worth speaking of, nothing really in the way of the checks on hacks, the spectre of encryption and the services being free there was previously little drive to do any work on replicating the network services. Such a hack is traditionally regarded as a fairly involved one as well; you typically do not have the code for the server so you are limited to observation and light fiddling.
Rather than a do nothing petition though a few hackers and several more users got together, figured out a way to bypass the security and ultimately replicated the server environment for a lot of games. Proof of concept happened early on and right now we are seeing early public tests of the setup. How it will all play out remains to be seen -- much of the code is open source so you could well run your own server if you wanted to. Though there is a list of games that have been tested the code should work for most wifi enabled games on the DS (Tetris DS, Advance Wars, a Bomberman title, Jump Ultimate Stars, Mario Kart and Phantasy Star Zero are among the titles confirmed working), many of those that do have extras have also been looked at. A lot of what was called DLC on the DS was in fact just an unlocked save (yes Nintendo does on disc DLC), another project popped up to save that.
To that end a huge congratulations to Toad King and Nagato for getting much of it done, significant contributions were made from Pikachu025 on the pokemon front and a thanks to all those that provided packet dumps and their time for testing things.
Right now for most DS games you will to use a flash cart or emulator, patching out the encryption side of things boiled down to a simple tool for nearly all games though. It is not outside the realm of possibility for cheat devices/cheat codes (remember there is NitroHax), indeed Prof. 9 made a nice code set for Picross 3d, and may even be able to see some save hacks one day but right now most are more focused on getting things running and more polished.
The Wii stuff will require a hacked Wii but why anybody would choose to go with a stock Wii we do not know.
For those that are more familiar with network engineering it seems the SSL connections were largely optional and forcing the URLs to unencrypted (aka remove the "s" in "https" for all the urls) saw it all work fine, even on the original Nintendo owned servers. Capturing this data gave the plaintext handshakes and beyond that it was all so much basic lobby and multicast type stuff. Many games have been observed to use the same basic protocol for actual play, high score tables and extras are a slightly different matter. The extras include things like Band Brothers and Daigasso downloadable content, pokemon extras and a bit more besides.
There is still more to do, especially on the extras front, and it will be a bit harder from here on in (being able to see and prod a working machine makes it so much easier to reverse engineer) but we are confident that work will carry on.
Umbrella site
http://save-nintendo-wifi.com/
Github for the code and instructions
https://github.com/polaris-/nintendo_dwc_emulator/wiki
Wii focused thread
here
DS focused thread
here
Thanks to Team Fail for the image.
You are encouraged to take technical questions to the relevant threads, more general comments might wish to post elsewhere to avoid clutter.
