Nintendo Wifi USB adapter - Hardware Impressions

The Nintendo USB Wifi adapter is a slick looking piece of equipment. Not much larger than a USB pen drive, it easily plugs into any spare port on your computer. It also comes with an extension cable that allows you to get a little bit more height for larger wireless coverage. Like many USB devices on Windows, the driver must be installed before you plug it in. After this step, the rest of installation was a breeze.

The Nintendo software runs in the taskbar of your Windows machine for easy access and sports a slick looking blue interface. It lets you see all of the DSes that are currently registered to play on your wireless hardware. Registration is a two step process, requiring you to request access from the DS, then grant access from the software. This prevents rouge DSes from taking advantage of your network, although with a published range of 30 feet, I can’t imagine that this would be much of a problem.

The adapter doesn’t seem to interfere with existing wireless signals that I have running, including a Linksys router in mixed mode. Also, the Nintendo wireless signal isn’t detectable by snoopy laptops, so you won’t have to worry about anybody hacking into your computer via the Nintendo dongle. We tested out Nintendo’s Wifi with two DSes simultaneously, and it worked as seamlessly as my Linksys router with no lag whatsoever.

Another interesting tidbit of knowledge is contained in this screenshot. It shows some packets of information being exchanged over the Internet between the DS and its home base. You can see the DS requesting the IP address of the servers it intends to connect to. This is the real world equivalent of looking up a telephone number in the white pages. Information like this is interesting because it shows that Nintendo is using at least some standard Internet procedures rather than relying on an invented proprietary system, making it all the easier for third parties to eventually tunnel existing DS multiplayer games over the Internet.