In an interview with Eurogamer, Pierre Bourdon, developer of the GameCube and Wii Emulator called Dolphin, revealed that the Wii U GamePad can be simulated on a decent PC. He and two other hackers managed to reverse engineer the device and, after some time, figured out how it worked and what features could be implemented into the system in the future, should Nintendo choose to do so.
“The GamePad is actually not a very secure device (compared to the Wii U),” said Bourdon to Eurogamer. “The device firmware is stored in an unencrypted Flash, which allowed us to reverse engineer the binary code pretty easily. It is also using almost standard 802.11n, which made things easy to experiment on a PC.”
Last week, Bourdon tweeted his current progress on the GamePad controller simulated on the PC.
“We modified wpa_supplicant/hostapd to have it work with the non-standard things, and were able to pair a PC with a Wii U that way. This took us less than a week – our time since then has been spent reverse engineering the custom communication protocol used between the Wii U and the GamePad.”
Bourdon also discovered that the Wii U GamePad’s flash could be upgrading. Meaning that Nintendo could add additional features to the Wii U system and the GamePad, like cloud functionality and sending video and audio to the Internet.
Check out the full interview with Bourdon, where he explains more of his findings about the GamePad, some of which I may or may not have completely understood.
