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UK GAFers: DS wifi adapter availability?

M

MadFuzzy

Member
Well Mario Kart is out today in PAL land and whilst the game is plentiful in supply, it seems that NOWHERE has the wifi dongle for sale. I've just tried 4 major retailers in London on Oxford Street and it's either not on their system (and so not in stock) or they weren't even aware that Nintendo were releasing it "because they've done a deal with lots of companies so you don't need it" ("thanks" Game!) It also doesn't help that my Amazon pre-order from about 3 weeks ago hasn't shipped and is now saying it's in stock in 1-2 weeks.

So has anyone managed to get a DS wifi dongle at retail today (or had one shipped by an online retailer)? It looks to me like, once again, NOE have proved that they're rubbish.
 
MadFuzzy said:
Well Mario Kart is out today in PAL land and whilst the game is plentiful in supply, it seems that NOWHERE has the wifi dongle for sale. I've just tried 4 major retailers in London on Oxford Street and it's either not on their system (and so not in stock) or they weren't even aware that Nintendo were releasing it "because they've done a deal with lots of companies so you don't need it" ("thanks" Game!) It also doesn't help that my Amazon pre-order from about 3 weeks ago hasn't shipped and is now saying it's in stock in 1-2 weeks.

So has anyone managed to get a DS wifi dongle at retail today (or had one shipped by an online retailer)? It looks to me like, once again, NOE have proved that they're rubbish.
Click to expand...

Ahem..

Amazon
 
Xellotah said:
Ahem..

Amazon
Click to expand...

Ahem:
MadFuzzy said:
It also doesn't help that my Amazon pre-order from about 3 weeks ago hasn't shipped and is now saying it's in stock in 1-2 weeks.
Click to expand...

It seems that there's a genuine lack of stock of the hardware in the UK and I don't want to wait 1-2 weeks for it to arrive.
 
MadFuzzy said:
Ahem:


It seems that there's a genuine lack of stock of the hardware in the UK and I don't want to wait 1-2 weeks for it to arrive.
Click to expand...

I think they're in stock now, it now says 1-2 days for delivery. I think they weren't shipping the dongle until the wifi service was up.

I'll order one now, just to test the my theory :p
 
Merlin said:
Isn't anywhere selling 3rd party ones? I was hoping to get one after work!!
Click to expand...

There are plenty of 3rd party usb wifi adapters... whether or not they are compatible though is another matter.

There was a compatibility list on GAF a while back, but those were for wireless routers ( I think ).
 
Game are fucking useless. Honestly. Their recruitment policie are even poorer then CEX...and that's saying something.
 
ok - to clear a few things up - there is no shortage of silver DS H/W in the UK right now.
the reason you might not find any "dongles" is because retailers didn't buy any from us - we took them to them and they didn't want them - this is not Nintendo's fault!

for those of you who know who I am and need a "dongle" give me a shout at work - i have some under my desk.
 
The Colonel said:
the reason you might not find any "dongles" is because retailers didn't buy any from us - we took them to them and they didn't want them - this is not Nintendo's fault!
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that this is a repeat of the PAL GC broadband adapter/modem situation? Lots of retailers saying "We don't want to have to support people playing online cos it's too much trouble so we won't buy any".

I'll give CEX and Game Focus a shot in a minute, since they're just down the road, but, as usual, this is pretty shitty of UK retailers not wanting to stock the necessary kit.
 
The Colonel said:
for those of you who know who I am and need a "dongle" give me a shout at work - i have some under my desk.
Click to expand...

Where do you work? Can anyone confirm that 3rd party ones are compatible?
 
Nothing at CEX (doesn't sound like they'll stock it either, but given their staff who can tell) and no joy at Game Focus, although they say they will stock the UK one when their delivery comes in (which isn't until next week apparently, not quite a day 1 shipment of hardware there). Still, at least Game Focus had nice collection of "rare" Saturn games to look at instead.
 
Bugger. BTW I was also wondering are the wifi spots in places like starbucks on for 24hours or just while they're open?
 
take the opportunity to get yourself a wireless router, and free yourself from having your PC on all the time. It'll work with PSP as well
 
mrklaw said:
take the opportunity to get yourself a wireless router, and free yourself from having your PC on all the time. It'll work with PSP as well
Click to expand...

Got one but I'm not downgrading from WPA to WEP just to play my DS online I'm afraid. No WPA support was a bit of a silly oversight really (which I *hope* they fix for Revolution). Looks like I'm waiting for Amazon to ship my dongle, whenever that'll be.
 
DS doesn't support WPA?


I wonder if you could get another wireless access point just for DS, and have your LAN firewall set up to only allow the DS IP address through from that access point?
 
mrklaw said:
DS doesn't support WPA?


I wonder if you could get another wireless access point just for DS, and have your LAN firewall set up to only allow the DS IP address through from that access point?
Click to expand...

Nope, there's no WPA support at all (just unencrypted and WEP). According to a friend of mine who quizzed NOA about it at E3, they said "who would want to sniff DS network traffic anyway?" which TOTALLY missed the point. I'm guessing that unless some developer writes their own implimentation in software it'll never happen.

Supposedly you can use a third-party wifi-dongle to do the same job, but I might as well wait for my Nintendo one now. There's a thread on using a third-party one on rllmukforums somewhere.
 
Seems strange. GAME in Sweden is carrying the USB wifi adapter and I didn't have any problems in scoring one a couple of days ago.
 
argh, this makes me uneasy for when I go to the store tomorrow. Anyone in amsterdam or the netherlands got on in store yet?
 
I got that adaptor from Argos, and after many hours of battling finally managed to overcome it and get connected to my win98 system. In the end it wasn't too bad, considering I had never setup a network before. If you're gonna get a dongle of some sort, the thing you need to be aware of is that once you've installed the dongle and set it to access point, you then need to setup internet connection sharing on your PC so that the dongle can access you're broadband modem. Only then will your DS connect.

Here's the page that I used to help me setup ICS.

Once you've done that you may then need to then manually setup your connection profile on your DS. Here's the page(scrolldown to the white box) that I used to help me do that.

Oh, and Mario Kart is absolutely awesome, the 60fps with a comprehensible physics model is awesome. My friend code is 446736 708492 if you wanna add me.
 
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