lifning

๐Ÿ—ฆ old and unimproved! ๐Ÿ—ง

  • gender? 'ardly she/'er!

if you read my header image, i'm sorry


๐Ÿ“ blog
lifning.info/
๐Ÿ’ช demogroup
hell-labs.itch.io/
๐ŸŒ fediverse
snoot.tube/@lifning
๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ website league
beam.phosphor.buzz/@lifning

lifning
@lifning

Years ago, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection shut down, killing multiplayer for however many DS and Wii games. (absent any fanmade patches to run against fanmade replacement servers)

Later, Nintendo also pulled the plug on Miiverse, thereby disabling everything from cute experimental social features like the messages-in-a-bottle in Wind Waker HD to the functionality of sharing and downloading levels in Mario Maker 1.

Recently the 3DS eShop went offline too, so now you can't even buy digital titles, DLC, DSiWare, etc. any more. (though you still can and should plunder them at sea)

You know what didn't go offline? You know what fundamentally can't even have a temporary outage? StreetPass. As long as there are two 3DSes in the world, Nintendo could go bankrupt and shut down all their servers -- hell, the internet as we know it could cease to be -- and 3DS-toting strangers would still be able to passively share tiny bits of data with each other's games wirelessly when they're near each other.

StreetPass was and is such a neat little thing. But Iwata's passed away, and Nintendo has finally "caught up" with the rest of the industry, and now everything they offer -- even their replacement for Virtual Console -- is tied to a centralized subscription service they'll shut down in a few years, and the game-playing world will wring its hands about lost media and preservation and the games no longer being playable or whatever.

But the little green light will keep on blinking when you go to games conventions.


outrider
@outrider

it's annoying that Nintendo pulled the plug on their streetpass "tagging" thing with public wifi hotspots, because being able to use a raspberry pi to build a streetpass network with your friends on the other side of the planet was rad as hell

now I'm wondering if rather than pretending to be a McDonald's free wifi access point it would be possible to get a Pi to pretend to be another DS, basically register any DS it passes to a central database that your friends elsewhere can also connect to so you just proxy the streetpass packets over the internet basically


lifning
@lifning

well the protocol is understood enough to have exploited it to launch homebrew, so i think this is in the realm of possibility (the vulnerability shown in this talk has been patched as of firmware version 11.12)


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lifning's post:

I went to a pinball convention a few weeks ago and brought my 3DS on a whim. Between the age of the clientele (mostly boomers) and the age of the system I didn't think I'd get anything. But sure enough, at the end of the day I pulled my 3DS out of my bag and the light was green. I got a single Streetpass from someone named Katy. Thank you Katy, and all the other Katys out there for keeping the dream going.