Nintendo WiFi over dial-up; works well enough?

by Christopher Grant { Feb 21st 2006 at 8:00AM }

A recap of the basic networking necessary to share your dial-up connection with your wireless Nintendo DS. The instructions are for Windows, although Mac OS X offers the same functionality, as does *NIX (although we suspect they probably won't need the guide). Requirements include: a computer with a pokey internet connection, a wireless router or Nintendo's USB WiFi dongle, a DS, and a WiFi compatible game.

The big question is whether or not the speeds are high enough to game without lag. The author of the guide claims, "At normal dial-up speed (56KB) it will go just about as fast as high speed internet; the only thing that will happen if you have a really slow dial-up connection or if you're downloading on the internet at the same time you will just see the other characters of the other people you are connected to go slow or bounce and the other people will just see your character go slow or bounce on their screen."

"As fast as high speed internet," eh? Let's just say we're skeptical. It's a good thing the DS currently doesn't have voice chat 'cause if a cutthroat bout of Mario Kart gets trashed cause someone's using dial-up....

Any brave Joystiqers using this method to get their NiWiFi fix?

[Via MAKE]

Tags: Dial-up

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

l0ne @ Feb 21st 2006 8:13AM

A friend of mine happily uses his iBook's Connection Sharing via AirPort to share his ADSL connection and play at home. I believe an access point (such as an AirPort base) should be pretty easy to set up for a DS (although anybody knows where can I get the DS's MAC address for my base's filter?).

madd_matt @ Feb 21st 2006 8:28AM

The MAC address for the DS is in the configuration screens for mario kart ds wifi connection somewhere I'm almost certain.

JoeMac @ Feb 21st 2006 8:47AM

I have used my iBook to tunnel the DS from an Airport card through the phone modem in order to play Mario Kart. It worked flawlessly, even in four-player battles. Phone modem works very well as long as the network coding is efficient and the bandwidth required (i.e. the number of players) stays within the limits of the connection being used.

bran @ Feb 21st 2006 8:48AM

after reading this article, I actually set this up and tested it. I'm glad my high speed account gives me a dial up number to screw with... It's a little more laggy while playing mario kart, especially when many objects (such as shells) are bouncing around. It is managable though. Animal Crossing was a little worse, but still playable (though I only tried it with one person, it may get unplayable with more). I don't have any other WIFI games but I'm guessing they're doable.

@1, you can find your ds's MAC address in the WIFI setup screen. It's on the same screen that has your WIFI ID.

Fuzz @ Feb 21st 2006 8:55AM

l0ne: grab the MAC address from the WIFI settings. It is under "info" or somthing like that. Poke around, it's in there .. I don't have my DS infront of me.

As for the dial-up. . it doesn't realy surpirse me that it would work, although I probably wouldn't want to try playing Metroid Prime Hunters that way.

Silver @ Feb 21st 2006 10:27AM

I use the Sprint PCS network through my cellphone through my laptop through the USB adapter. My internet speed is usually about twice standard dial-up. Playing Animal Crossing, I can have one, maybe two people in my town just fine, but if I get three, I start having problems.

I havn't tried MK over it.

pancakeshouse @ Feb 21st 2006 11:08AM

My parents have High-Speed Satelite internet, and if you know anything about it, you would know it sucks. Online gaming is virtually impossible due incredibly slow upload speeds. However, I was able to play Mario Kart DS online when I was there the other day, it took a while to find a match but when it did, it worked fairly well. Sometimes the karts would do goofy things, but overall you are still racing with the people.

I know Satelite is not dial-up, but it might as well be dial-up with faster download speeds yet slow uploads.

epobirs @ Feb 21st 2006 11:51AM

The actual data volume for most online games is very low. A well designed system uses very brief messages to declare what you are currently doing and what other players are doing. Usually if a player is continuing his previous action, such as moving in a particular direction, it takes a mere blip of data to indicate 'more of the same' to everybody else so that their individual systems can maintain a model of what each player is doing. This is why online gaming got a lot of mileage out of dial-up. It worked by and large. There are advantages to broadband, especially when voice chat of any decent quality becomes a factor. But overall it is latency (the time it takes for a single packet to reach all other players) rather than data volume that really matters. Broadband systems bypass a lot of the sections of the phone systems that can create higher latency.

Animal Crossing is an example of a game that should work fine on dial-up as it has very sedate action and a small number of players. Something like Mario Kart with voice chat running would be a lot harder to run smoothly over dial-up.

Peter7898m @ Feb 21st 2006 12:25PM

I use dial-up, but i still haven't got a wi-fi multiplayer DS game to test it yet. But i am very sure it will work. I play the PC game 'Guild wars' online using dial-up, their requirements say u only need 28k modem to play it, but i have 56k and it works fine. I only get lag if som1 else on the network starts downloading something. Another issue is the lengthy loading time before you play the game, apart from that the gameplay speed is normal. So when using dial up for DS, i expect the same performance.

Tarek @ Feb 21st 2006 12:25PM

This is a little misleading, as two concepts are being bundled into the word "speed" here.

What most of us associate with "speed" is, in fact, bandwidth, which refers to the amount of data you can squeeze down the pipe in a certain amount of time. Here, broadband or DSL or whathaveyou will certainly be "faster" than dialup, as is reflected in the "size" of the pipe (384kb/s or 56K or whatever)

The other element of "speed" is latency, which is the time it takes a packet to get to it's destination. This is way more important for responsiveness (low lag) than bandwidth, especially in DS games, which I'm assuming don't actually send a ton of data.

The two aren't necessarily correlated; you can have a high-bandwidth high-latency line (great for torrents, bad for gaming) or a small, fast pipe.

So, basically: bandwidth = width of pipe, latency = how slow the pipe is.

nojok3 @ Feb 21st 2006 1:41PM

The reason it looks as fast as high speed internet is because everyone else is experiencing the lag instead

CWKalel @ Feb 21st 2006 6:55PM

I don't use dial-up, I have cable. But I do use my Airport Express to connect to Nintendo's WiFi. MarioKartDS has been awesome, but I haven't been able to use Animal Crossing DS on WiFi because you need a friend code, and my friends aren't into games like this. Does anyone know of a community that shares friend codes?