WavePhoenix – Open-source implementation of the Nintendo WaveBird protocol | Hacker News Reader

WavePhoenix – Open-source implementation of the Nintendo WaveBird protocol

github.com

139 pointszdw14 comments

Available for preorders as premade devices here: https://www.laserbear.net/products/wavephoenix-replacement-w...

This is fantastic because there a large amount of WaveBirds controllers in existence which are missing their dongles.

Finally some love for the best controller ever made. Name of the project is also great. Hope to see some usb version of the dongle hw that supports multiple controllers.

Ooh this is fun actually will check this out. I have my Gamecube gathering dust somewhere, great excuse to bring it out.

I'm half joking, but the cynic in me worries that a company line Nintento will have some patents on something here and not appreciate the MIT licensing.

The WaveBird controller was released over 20 years ago, so a any patent protection it could have is gone.

Also, not a reason not to do things.

I thought about implementing something similar (I read through the reverse engineering docs).

All of the information was done through clean room reverse engineering (the reason it took so long for something like this is that Nintendo used a very wonky wireless protocol). As such, I don't see what they could sue for, as that is entirely legal (at least in the US).

Well clean-room reverse engineering doesn't protect you from patent infringement - only for copyright related issues. I don't think that's a real concern for your project though, as patents only last for 20 years, so most if not all patents related to the WaveBird should have expired already.

Of course, I am not a lawyer :^).

> Well clean-room reverse engineering doesn't protect you from patent infringement

That's fair! What is would offer is in going through the protocol, there's nothing that is patent-able (it's all bog standard wireless protocols).

BlueRetro GameCube has been around for quite some time.

https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro

I have two things going for me here, 1) this was completely clean room reverse engineered, and 2) the patents have all expired!

Nintendo has two things going for them though:

1. They have Billions of Dollars 2. They don't give a fuck about suing smaller creators into oblivion.

I wish you all the best but seriously, fuck nintendo.

I’ve just bought the Switch 2 GameCube controller and now I see this. Uncanny.

Is it theoretically possible for a driver to be written for the Wii to support dongleless play with the "Nintendont" homebrew app?

It would of course require driver modifications, and I don't know if the existing 2.4GHz radio is capable of this, but likely possible with custom firmware for the radio chip.

Probably not unless the radio supports the DSSS modulation. That's why they talk about looking for a chip that supports that.

In a similar way, older Bluetooth Classic chips generally cannot run Bluetooth Low Energy because of the different modulation in BLE (specifically DSSS again).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com