Sidewaysgravity Blog

It has been exactly one year since I got my Apple Airport Extreme base station and it has been that same amount of time since I was able to connect my Nintendo DS Lite up to the wifi…. until today.

The symptoms, there really was only one, when going to connect to the router, my Nintendo DS would show my wireless network with a gray lock. No lock is an unsecured network, a red lock is a secured network, and a gray lock is also a secured network, but one that has settings that the DS does not support.

Today I found the solution to my problem, the gray lock, through lots of searching and two very useful posts.

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Edco/airport-extreme-and-nintendo-ds-wifi-78447.phtml

and

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/33/41958-connecting-ds-airport-extreme-802-11n-solution.html

Both posts basically say the same thing. Just in case these links don’t work at a future date I will sum up what they say. Your Nintendo DS only supports certain encryption settings (WEP). Wireless (N) which is what the new airport extreme’s use does not support the type of (WEP) that is needed. When you open up the Airport Utility found in the Applications/Utilities folder you will click on the manual setup. The Airport icon should be selected by default and you will need to select the Wireless tab.

Radio Mode while holding the option key

In the drop down labeled “Radio Mode” by default there are no non-N network settings…. but they are their… sort of. When you click to select the Radio Mode, hold down the option key and like magic you will see several options that were not available before. From this list you can choose 802.11b/g compatible for your Radio Mode. Now you can select for the drop down labeled “Wireless Security” Web 128 bit. This is assuming you want wireless security on your router. With that selected you will need to create a thirteen character passcode that you will use to connect all wireless devices. Once done, click on update and try your connection again.

One side note about security that was brought up in the reply posts of the second link was that WEP security is not very strong. This is true and it is something to take into consideration if changing your settings to WEP from a more secure method (WPA). Because I do not use my DS online very often, and since I now can easily set it up, I keep my network at WPA2 security and only change it to WEP when playing the DS online. Although its not the best solution, it works for now.

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If you were one of the unlucky ones like myself to order your game at BestBuy, you probably were not able to get the game until Monday the 27th while most preorders from gamestop were able to get the game the Saturday before. With that said, once I got it home and plugged it in I was pressed for time and skipped the update and went straight into the game. It was fun and smooth sailing, getting to know the easy controls and learning to jump, dress, stick, and all sorts of other things. After playing around for a while I ran the update and then it would let me connect to the servers to use the online funtions. This is where the frustration came into play. Day one the servers I think had a heart attack and since levels, friends, trophies, scores, menu system are all integrated to the online functionality, then if the network fails, the game fails.

I was constantly watching a frozen screen waiting to get into a menu that I would eventually have to get out of due to delays. Playing a game online was nearly impossible since it took to long to load any level. I was successfully able to invite some friends into our game where they were froze half the time and vice versa when we went to their game. All in all the first day was a fail for the network and a success for the game. Later that night the servers appeared to be turned off again and did not appear to be back on untill 2pm tuesday.

I did have a chance to play around online a little tuesday as the servers were back up, and I must say the game is a lot of fun and the online section is great!! So far I did not have any issue with the online system today, but that might just be due to the fact that it was 2 in the afternoon when most people are not online. Tonight will be the real test to see how the network does under stress… hopefully well.

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