Three cheers for Nintendo - turns out that, for once, Nintendo is doing a a lot of cool stuff based entirely on open standards. Like Wi-Fi. And to top that off, it appears that Nintendo's own Wi-Fi adapter for PC is actually completely Linux-compatible. And the craziest part appears to be that you can use stock unmodified Nintendo hardware to run homebrew games over Wi-Fi.

Yep - rt2570 driver recognises Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector. Set it up, fired up Ethereal (should upgrade to Wireshark =), told Nintendo DS to look for a network, and stood in awe as broadcast packets appeared in Ethereal.

The thing is, it ended at seeing the broadcast in Ethereal. Of course, DS couldn't find an AP. Hardware is apparently the easy part. Now, to actually use DS networking, I'd need to make the dongle to actually respond to AP broadcast, set up the link, and route my packets. In other words, I need the SoftAP part for Linux. Easier said than done, it appears that host-based AP stuff is supported for certain hardware, but I couldn't find that for rt2570...

(There bloody well has to be a way to do this. DS Wireless Multiboot has to be harder to hack together than a minimal AP thingy.)

Also, Tetris DS seems to rule. Tetris is always Tetris, of course, and the new game modes are very interesting. To honour the return of classic to the new machine, I tried playing the game for the first time while wearing the original GameBoy headphones... =)

A long time ago, I made a rather odd observation in Super Smash Bros. Melee: Fox McCloud wags his tail to the tune of the Dr. Mario music, on the Mushroom Kingdom II level.

Fox McCloud is cute, Fox McCloud's tail is particularlcy cute - so having Fox McCloud wag the cute tail to the rhythm of the cute music is pretty cute!

Emergent gameplay at its finest.

So I made a rather silly, short video capture commemorating this. It's on gamevideos.com too, but needs QuickTime. The YouTube version may not be in sync. (Not sure if I keep it around either due to that fact. might need to make a better version.)

Thank God for YouTube. They make so easy to find really cool game stuff. And some... weird stuff, too. Okay, mostly the weird stuff. And cool stuff.

I've seen some screenshots of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon before, but seeing the thing in motion was a downright amusing experience. This stuff will haunt me. HAUNT me. I really wouldn't mind seeing a Zelda game with Zelda being the lead character, or even (!) seeing a Zelda game with actual dialogue, but looks like this is the kind of stuff that leaves Nintendo folks scarred for life. And I'm not blaming them. But a game with Zelda on lead, please? Princess Peach got her own game, why not Zelda?

Then YouTube has some classic videos, like that commercial, and some cool fan stuff, like this amazing bit.

I've migrated the blog to Hobix, mostly because Hobix seems to be a little bit better geared toward my uses. It's smaller, less complex, handles multiple blogs well and is not squaking on the edges and depending on sqlite, which is not that well supported on Ruby. But this is still a ruby-based blogware and kind of close to the roots of this blog, Blosxom.

I hope this will make the blog a bit easier to work on. At least the upgrading on a shared host isn't that tricky anymore.