First rant

Hi!!!

I decided to finally put together a shitty website. At least it’s made with Hugo, so I don’t have to deal with most of the problems that come with building a small and cute :3 website.

This space of mine will be used to talk about many things I fear, but my current obsession is getting the Wii U Gamepad to connect to a PC without hiccups of any sort AND with actual ease of use.

For anyone who doesn’t know, there’s already a way to connect the infamous controller to a normal computer, but the process is manual, tedious and doesn’t work very well. There are some fixes and patches listed at the end of this webpage (check it out! it also helps with the installation, if you wanna take a crack at it :P), but they don’t seem to work that well for me either.

Intel journey

My first efforts were sadly wasted trying to make my Intel wifi card talk to the Gamepad. For more context, please check sheepy’s blog (I believe it would make my friend happy :3).

Yes, Intel makes wifi cards. Mainly for laptops… if you have a laptop with an Intel CPU, there’s a high chance the wifi card is Intel too.

TSF

I wrote a kernel patch for the iwlwifi driver, which is the driver for many (if not all) Intel wifi cards. Maybe the very first Intel wifi card isn’t supported; I don’t know. Anyway, the patch was for exporting the TSF (Timing Synchronization Function) value outside the driver, which was surprisingly possible and not even that hard! Again, if you don’t even know what TSF is, I highly suggest you look at my friend’s blog.

Like many other cards, Intel’s don’t let you read the value, because it’s genuinely useless for the computer to know what it is. I mean sure, there you go, a microsecond-precise counter for free! Most cards, being consumer cards, can’t be bothered with that.

…or can they?

So basically I (my Claude) discovered that inside the driver’s code, a special value called gp2 represented a 32-bit counter that (guess what) was driven by a 1 MHz oscillator (1 MHz = one tick every 1/1000000 of a second = 1 microsecond)! I was so happy at first, so much so that I believed gp2 to be the TSF I was looking for.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. But with some fuckass tests (flooding the kernel log with numbers) I did find out that the values are actually synced, and more importantly I found the real TSF value, and turned it into an offset to use with gp2, making the most accurate representation of TSF you can get out of an Intel wifi card.

sheepy tested the patch with her AX210 and confirmed it worked. I couldn’t test it. Why???

Moloch or LAR

Radio equipment has been in use for ages, for all sorts of purposes: entertainment, toys, communication, all sorta stuff. Ships and navies got there first, back when radio was just telegraphy through the air. Then airplanes, then the household radio set, then TV, etc. etc… And the more stuff piled onto the air, the more it all stepped on each other: in 1912, amateur chatter famously got in the way of the Titanic’s distress calls, and the first real radio laws followed within months. Spectrum is shared and finite, and nobody gets to use it if everybody just transmits whatever they want. Therefore: regulations.

I’m not against them, don’t get me wrong. I’m against Intel.

Wifi has regulations too: some regions of the world let you have 5 GHz wifi, some don’t, some only block a specific frequency… It’s fairly complicated, but both routers and wifi cards have to comply somehow.

Fun fact about me: I live in Italy, so I get EU rules, and the EU chops consumer, non specialized (meaning no DFS) 5 GHz into two main pieces:

• Low 5 GHz (channels 36 to 48) is the relaxed band: no quirks or hoops, but indoor only, which is normal for, well, indoor use. Since 2022 Italy lets you take it outside too, as long as you’re not a fixed installation.
• High 5 GHz (channels 149 to 165) isn’t a wifi band. You can transmit, sure, at an eighth of the power, which is too weak for wifi transmission. The band got written into the wifi standard at the end of 2024, but a standard isn’t a law, and nobody changed the law.

What’s the deal with all this sparse information? Why am I lecturing you about regulations? Well, because Intel fucked up bad.

To comply with regulations back then, the OS used to tell the card its region, and the card would block the appropriate frequencies/features/etc. These days, though, a lot of wifi cards (Intel’s included) implement a firmware feature called LAR (Location Aware Regulatory) (note: Intel calls it LAR, but the principle is the same for many other cards).

What it does is very simple: it scans the area, looks at the routers nearby, checks their country code (two bytes sent by the router) and, with a magic formula we will never know, automatically picks the region for you.

Sounds smart on the surface. A shame it’s unreliable as fuck for some people (picking Indonesian/Chinese regulations when living in the US). And even when it gets your country right, like it does for me, you’re stuck with whatever the card decided, and you can’t change it: there used to be a switch to turn LAR off, but Intel removed it in 2019.

But technically, per regulations, I should be able to freely navigate the low 5 GHz band (you know, to make libdrc’s default setup work), so why am I talking about this? Why would I want to disable that system? Why is LAR a problem for me?

TL;DR: Intel believes my card can join a low 5 GHz network but never start one, while handing me SIX times the legal power on high 5 GHz (essentially giving me the power to illegally start a network on the band).
And I have reason to believe this is not just a problem for me, or Italy, but for all EU countries and citizens.

That means that I can’t really test my patch, because I can’t start a low 5 GHz network with my Intel card, which is what you need to do to make libdrc work.

“Why the bitching? Just use a different card!” people might ask, and I’ll let them in on a secret: Intel wifi cards are the best for Linux. They’re the best supported. They have the best stability. Why Intel would do something like this to all of us geeks, we’ll never know.

Intel fucked up bad, and doesn’t want to fix its problems.

Firmware RE tangent

So what could I possibly do, if not get my hands dirty with machine code? Hehehe >:3

TODO: WRITE THIS SECTION

I’m too eepy to write this story right now, but my findings brought me to this:

• For Italians who have the AC9560 card and have found a method to bypass its secure boot: open the file iwlwifi-9000-pu-b0-jf-b0-46.ucode (found in /lib/firmware) with your preferred hex editor and overwrite address 0xd3c67 with the number 2. This MIGHT solve all your problems.

Old regulations

Well, that was a complete waste of time (for me at least).

At least I have all the (illegal) freedom regarding high 5 GHz networks… could that be useful in any way? Asking myself that, the next question came instantly: couldn’t the Gamepad connect over high 5 GHz too?

No.

I tried and tried, with both my Intel wifi card and my trusty wifi dongle (the one I use regularly for libdrc testing!), but no, hostapd got ignored every time.

The problem is, sheepy could connect her Gamepad to her PC over high 5 GHz, and Famidawg even told me that Gamepads scan both low and high 5 GHz and pick the least congested (ofc). Both have american consoles.

TODO: WRITE THIS SECTION BETTER

Why couldn’t I connect? Well, if you’ve followed me so far, you should know high 5 GHz is not a wifi band in Europe, so of course european consoles won’t even scan for those frequencies…

Mind you: at this point of research I wasn’t really aware of all the regulations, most of the info I’ve told here has been properly researched at the time of writing…

Well… Funny. On one hand I’ve got a modern device that makes illegal choices; on the other, an old device that ACTUALLY FOLLOWS EU REGULATIONS. FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK

I hope you can empathise with my frustration.

Where am I at now?

I’ve decided to shift my focus from connectivity to video codecs, because the main issue with libdrc really is just video streaming: it glitches and desyncs.

From what I know, it could be a billion things: bad connectivity, bad TSF values, wrong x264 settings, etc etc…

So I thought: what can I remove from the equation?

And, as the madman that I am, I decided to “reverse engineer” the Wii U’s h264 codec. :D

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