We ordered our adapter last week, and – impressively – it arrived the very next day by courier. Not so impressively though were the contents. There wasn’t even a box – just the adapter itself, a USB extension cable, driver CD and instruction manual, shoved between a piece of cardboard.
No box?
For those unaware, the Wi-Fi adapter creates a wireless access point for all Nintendo DS systems within a thirty foot radius, allowing them to connect their chosen game to Nintendo’s online service. The process to set this up is relatively straight forward – jam the driver CD into the CD drive, and it will go on its merry way. It will then prompt you to connect the USB drive, complete the installation, and you should be good to go.
But, should you run into any problems (and many others by the look of it), you could be scratching your head for a long time. The setup is incredibly crude, and attempts to do the same thing, regardless of the PC. That is, set up a new LAN connection for the Wi-Fi adapter, then create a shared internet connection with any existing LAN setup you have. A single thing cannot be configured. Because of how varied PCs can be, this will not work in many cases. The errors that stop the setup can be quite varied, too, from such ludicrous things as “Nintendo USB Wi-Fi adapter not found”, to “a network bridge is present, please delete it”, or the incredibly vague “internet sharing connection error”.
Network bridges are evil
Installing the adapter itself shouldn’t cause too many dramas though. Once that’s done, a Wi-Fi connection will surface in the taskbar, initially grey. When it turns blue, it’s open for service, and you can attempt to get your DS connected. To do this, simply fire up a Wi-Fi game, and tap the “Nintendo WFC” icon. You will be directed to the Wi-Fi connection setup, where you can select from any existed Wi-Fi networks, or Nintendo’s USB connector. Tap the latter, and again, the whole process is automated. It will try to find the Wi-Fi point. Of course, not just anybody can connect.
The interface is quite good – if not rather laggy
Through the Wi-Fi software, you can determine who can and can’t connect to the service – simply bring up the program, right click on the name, and either confirm or deny their request. Simple. In this case we want to allow the connection. Do this and the DS will find the Wi-Fi point, be assigned an IP address, and connect to the internet.
It works! Huzzah!
Of course, this is where we had most of our trouble, with a pesky error ‘52003’. The software didn’t aid us here, as, again, there are no configuration options available.
…And it doesn’t work. Wahhhh!
Judging from the technical help board at the official Wi-Fi website, it isn’t uncommon either. It seems to rise in the case where a machine is connected to a wired router – which is a somewhat common set up. To get around this, we have to disable connection sharing in our internet connection, then create a network bridge between that and the Wi-Fi adapter – but, the software will not start up with a network bridge (no error messages or anything – it just won’t do anything), so this process must be completed each time. Sigh. Similar workarounds for other errors have also been found. The software, on the whole, seems to be very resource hungry (having the Wi-Fi connection enabled slowed down other applications considerably, even on a PC that can play the likes of F.E.A.R.), and generally unstable, with it often not responding to clicks of the mouse, or just actually not running at all. It just feels like it was rushed and we hope that Nintendo release updates through their website in due course.
No bigger than your average USB drive
But, once finally online, the service seems to be extremely reliable – we didn’t encounter a single drop-out, or any sort of significant lag. Considering their cheap price when compared to a decent wireless router, they are actually a fairly solid alternative, and well worth a look.
And then there’s the rumour of it also being compatible with Revolution…
. I'm going to try again a bit more this weekend.
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