I was probably a bit too hasty when I picked up a Wii U just after launch, last year. I always feel that way after buying a new console. With the early days usually having a library that evokes a ghost town, it’s never long before I go back to spending all of my time with my stalwart PC.
Yet I never regretted my purchase, because I simply adore the Wii U Gamepad. It’s full of potential, cruelly limited to use with only the Wii U, but now three hackers have reverse engineered the controller to allow them to stream PC games to its lovely little screen, presenting their findings in a lecture which took place yesterday.
“Around december 2012, I started working with two other hackers in order to reverse engineer, document and implement the Wii U gamepad communication protocols on a PC,” One of the hackers explains. The group wants to be able to use the gamepad for all manner of things, from controlling robots to flying quadricopters, but first they had to learn how it worked and figure out how to communicate with it, which led to Gamepad emulation on a PC.
You can check out the detailed slide presentation from the lecture here, where you can see them running Final Fantasy VII on the Gamepad, and more information is available at the open source community libdrc, where developers and reverse engineers can learn to use the Gamepad with their software.
Cheers, Polygon.