In May of this year Nintendo shut down online gameplay for the original Wii and several DS models to make room for Wii U and 3DS servers to get people to buy the Wii U and 3DS. Players weren’t happy. If you haven’t smashed or traded-in your old system yet there’s hope! Hackers have built a working server emulator that can restore online play.
The plan for the emulated server was announced on GBATEMP.net back in February by user “Toad King.” At the time Toad King wrote:
I’m starting this project in response to the announcement of Nintendo Wi-Fi servers shutting down in May. Eventually this project hopes to have enough information so myself or other hackers have enough information to reverse engineer the Nintendo Wi-Fi servers and make emulated servers to live long after the May 20th cutoff date.Â
It seems to have taken some time, but it apparently worked. The GitHub site linked to in the post appears to have been updated early yesterday morning with instructions on how to connect to the working test server. For Wii users, the hack requires a Homebrew-enabled system, and DS users need to use the proper Action Replay DS(i) code, but if you’re reading an article about hacked server emulators, we’re assuming you’re already on board with Homebrew.
Since this is just a test server, the site alerts potential players that it’s subject to restarts and downtime, so be patient. We haven’t found any confirmed reports of the emulated server working, but we’ll be running some tests soon to see for ourselves. In the meantime, if anyone tries this, please let us know how it works out.
(via GBATEMP.net, GitHub, and Justin Ouellette, image via Dr. Mario Online Rx)
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