Any way to patch Nintendo DS games to work with WPA Wi-Fi connection?

[Moon164]

Recently I've returned to playing some Nintendo DS Online games through MelonDS, but I wanted to be able to play them on my 3DS, I know that some games like Pokémon Black/Black2 or White/White2 work with WPA connections when used on a DSi or 3DS.

This left me in doubt, is it possible to apply some kind of patch to older games like Mario Kart DS for them to work with a WPA connection instead of being limited to WEP only?

 

[Kwyjor]

That question again, "is it possible". Many things in Heaven and Earth lay within the broad realm of "possible".

There has been no shortage of people interested in this in the past, and no one has done it yet, so you can be fairly confident that it is very unlikely to happen.

 

[rantex92]

iirc you should look into wimmfi its been a long time since i mingled with online play but the wimmfi patcher should be able to patch wpa? (im not sure if it patches wpa in or changes the wep server adress for online play)

 

[NyaakoXD]

Unfortunately, no.

Only thing you can do is set up a wifi connection on your router/mobile hotspot with WEP/no security. You can make it so that the network is not visible to anyone and can only work if you manually put in the network name into the DS network settings.

 

[Kwyjor]

iirc you should look into wimmfi its been a long time since i mingled with online play but the wimmfi patcher should be able to patch wpa? (im not sure if it patches wpa in or changes the wep server adress for online play)

No, wimmfi is in no way concerned with the connection between the DS and the router. That only deals with the connection from the router to the rest of the Internet. (I'm not sure what the technical terms are.)

Only thing you can do is set up a wifi connection on your router/hotspot with WEP/no security. You can make it so that the network is not visible to anyone and can only work if you manually put it into the DS network settings.

You can also further restrict the router so that it only allows connections from the unique MAC address of your DS – but MAC addresses can be spoofed by someone sufficiently determined. (I can't understand why someone would go through that kind of trouble just to use one's router, though.)

 

[master801]

is it possible to apply some kind of patch to older games like Mario Kart DS for them to work with a WPA connection instead of being limited to WEP only?

It's been discussed in the past iirc, but nothing has been done yet afaik.

Pokemon B/W has WPA support because it is a DSi-enhanced title.

 

[FAST6191]

The solution is visit the junk shop, buy an old router (the DS is pretty picky about such things so hopefully you get one that plays nicely) that you can reasonably configure (don't know the state of ISP provided things around you, oftentimes they are limited though) and power that up/plug in the network cable when you care to play DS stuff as a secondary thing. Can go crazy with the other security if you absolutely must (mac filtering was mentioned above, as was hidden SSID even if that causes issues sometimes, you could also do the isolated subnet and what routers actually are supposed to be in the real world of networking to keep it from your other devices if that is the concern rather than your bandwidth which you could also throttle as DS is hardware limited to something like 2 megabit...).

Anyway theoretically it is possible. You would have to adapt the game to be a DSi game as baseline DS hardware has no such abilties. Decompilation is a thing on the horizon for the DS (it mostly still used C, though enough inline assembly and higher level interpreted for some things to make it tricky) but traditional assembly approaches would probably be the way. Harder things have been done by hackers (it is rather more than a mapper change but that side of the hacking world)
Once it could present as a DSi game you would then have access to the DSi aspects of the hardware which do speak WPA.
Theoretical options 2 and 3 are build some kind of GBA slot wifi adapter that can speak WPA and direct things to that (could do a DS slot affair maybe a la DS serial, enhanced flash carts or the like) or capture the data normally aimed at using nifi (local multilplayer/download play) and fire that around instead if that mode works for you. People have pondered the latter a bit more, usually wanting to play said local stuff over the internet. One of the theoretical approaches (decapitate a DS and use its guts to do the deed, speaking onwards to FPGA or something to get it into the computer, rather easier than hoping your wifi card can be tweaked to speak nifi or playing with a big boy spectrum analyser) could also be used here.

This is not a practical hack though and the benefits so very slim (though I guess with the boost from DSi mode you might gain some other potential options in this) hence not even a proof of concept.

 

[xMarvin732]

I use my phone for hotspot, set it to no security set to one device only, hide network, whitelist DS MAC.

 

[thenextgui]

With an android phone, you can change the mobile hotspot settings to WEP and open, and then connect the DS

 

[SylverReZ]

https://wiki.ds-homebrew.com/ds-index/wifi

 

[AkikoKumagara]

https://wiki.ds-homebrew.com/ds-index/wifi

o cool, they linked my tutorial I feel special.

 

[SylverReZ]

o cool, they linked my tutorial I feel special.

Oooh is it? Its very well documented, so thank you for contributing.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

Oooh is it? Its very well documented, so thank you for contributing.

The Linux one they linked

I do wish we could just patch in support for newer security protocols or at least WPA like DSi-Enhanced games could use, though. OP was onto a good idea here and in the other times I've seen this topic come up, too! I just don't know how realistic something like this is.

 

[Kwyjor]

I just don't know how realistic something like this is.

If it was realistic, someone would have done it by now!

 

[AkikoKumagara]

If it was realistic, someone would have done it by now!

I don't necessarily agree with this thought. I think a lot of people just don't care to put in the effort to try something like this (and I'm sure it's not a simple task, if it's possible) when the official game servers are down for almost everything on the platform and there are a dozen other easier ways to connect a DS to a less secure access point.

If official servers were still up and demand for something like this we're higher, I would fully expect someone to care enough to at least try to accomplish this.

 

[tabzer]

If it was realistic, someone would have done it by now!

Where there is a will, there is a way. Giving up because someone else didn't do it might be the same reason that nobody did it in the first place; because they thought the same way. Or maybe they didn't feel it was worth it.

 

[Kwyjor]

Giving up because someone else didn't do it might be the same reason that nobody did it in the first place; because they thought the same way. Or maybe they didn't feel it was worth it.

That is a fine sentiment in some cases, but this is one of those things where too many people have been too interested for too long. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're quite right in that the difficulty involved is so unrealistic that it is not "worth it" when you can just go out and buy another router.

If official servers were still up

It hardly matters whether the official servers are still up or not if you'd need extensive hacking and/or homebrewing to get this working at all – and you most certainly would need that much.

 

[tabzer]

That is a fine sentiment in some cases, but this is one of those things where too many people have been too interested for too long.

The point is that someone has to take a loss for the team. How many people want to take a loss? I do believe that you are understanding in the following:

I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're quite right in that the difficulty involved is so unrealistic that it is not "worth it" when you can just go out and buy another router.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

It hardly matters whether the official servers are still up or not if you'd need extensive hacking and/or homebrewing to get this working at all – and you most certainly would need that much.

I'm not arguing against that. It matters if official servers are still up because more people would care about this being accessible. It's a very niche thing at this point that most people wouldn't benefit enough from to justify the effort.

 

[FAST6191]

If we are doing one of those fun Venn diagrams then the percentage of those inclined towards this and those that would somehow not use the third party replacements (from the end user perspective almost rendered as a cheat at one point, mostly involves removing the S from HTTPS inside the file and shuffling the rest up/padding it out while changing DNS on your DS or somewhere along the line, though I believe the more modern takes even cracked the SSL aspect) is barely worth considering.

I would go so far as to say the greater limitation in that scenario is the lack of DSi (much less hacked ones) out there.

The only way I can see this happening is if it turns out there is a simple "just get it over the line" means of converting a game to present as DSi compatible -- in other systems doing mapper changes, boosting to quasi sequel systems (think GB to GBC), using addons (think 32x and megaCD for the megadrive/genesis), converting to the faster/larger storage/on cart processing can have and other such things that DS to DSi conversion would join the ranks of there have been examples where it might not have the potency of code made explicitly for it but still more than its baseline.
That I can also see as not being investigated for lack of interest as well (nobody cared about the cycloDSi which was historically the main method and the DSi and 3ds DSi mode hacks came rather later in the day). I am not putting any kind of money on it happening though.
https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dsibasicdifferencestonds (scroll up for the main DSi index or go to the top of the whole page) does not have anything leap out at me as being that easy (I might be hazy on the DSi but I will throw down on the DS).
Edit. Returning to an earlier comment if I am placing money on something I would put it more on someone having fun with a firmware hack (see some of the stuff people were doing with replacing the chips with larger ones the other month) and doing the replacement wifi board part of that decides to encapsulate it in something else/tunnel it/emulate the original interface but do something on the backend transparent to that. https://gbatemp.net/blogs/ds-cart-mod-to-make-a-wifi-board-flasher.19313/ and https://gbatemp.net/blogs/turning-my-nintendo-ds-into-an-ique-ds.19249/#ubs-comment-228991 for a jumping off point there.