Heather, being the cool wife she is, got me a Nintendo DS a few weeks ago since I had mentioned I wanted one. She got me the Mario Kart bundle so I have been having fun having my ass handed to me by other players online. The built-in Wi-Fi feature is pretty cool, my only gripe is that the DS only supports WEP encryption. Fortunately, as a techie i happen to be swimming in extra network gear so I was able to make use of an old access point for the DS without having to downgrade my router from WPA2 encryption.

I ran into a couple of snags initially getting connected to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection at home with an old spare Linksys WAP11, fortunately, a bit of googling did the trick:

• the basic transfer rate needs to be set to 1-2 Mbps – thanks to John for figuring this out
• the WEP key on the Nintendo DS needs to be entered in HEX and not as the passphrase used to generate it – RTFM was helpful

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the online enabled Tetris DS that is due this March.