The Issue With Wii U Gamepads and How to Clone Them
How hard would it be to clone the Wii U gamepad, the quirky controller with its unique embedded screen? This is the question that [MattKC] faced as he noticed the complete lack of Wii U gamepad replacements from either Nintendo or third-parties, leading him down the rabbit hole of answering said question.
Although unloved and even despised in compared to the Nintendo Wii, the Wii U was a solid system in its own right. One of its interesting additions was the gamepad controller, whose screen games used for features like a private screen during multiplayer and 3DS-like map screens. Its main weakness is however that the Wii U gamepad was considered an irreplaceable part of the console, which is obviously not fun if your gamepad breaks and your console along with it.
The Wii U console and gamepad communicate via 5 GHz 802.11n WiFi, but in order to deter other parties from simply hopping onto the access point, Nintendo slightly obfuscated this WiFi standard. Specifically the WPA authentication was modified by a byte swap in the PTK, rendering every existing WiFi stack incompatible with the Wii U.
Knowing this, the key is to use a platform that allows one to pre-break WPA in a similar fashion, such as is possible on e.g. Linux and BSD. Along with the use of the hilariously insecure WPS that is triggered when the gamepad’s sync button is pressed, this enables one to connect a modified Linux system to a Wii U console. After this the console starts sending h.264 (AVC) encoded video to the ‘gamepad’, and a binary packet can be sent back with the controller inputs.
Suffice it to say that this finding was immediately turned into a GitHub project called Vanilla Wii U, that enables a Steam Deck to be used as a gamepad, as well as any Linux – and presumably BSD – system with a compatible WiFi adapter. This latter point is key, as the non-standard authentication method has to be bypassed in software. This means for example that an un-modded Nintendo Switch cannot be used either.
The technical challenges combined with the systems relatively low popularity explain why third-party gamepads never appeared. However, now that the Wii U is a retro console, these efforts are essential for keeping these consoles working. We’d love to see the PlayStation Portal get modded into being a Wii U gamepad, since it’s basically a more limited clone of the same concept.
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