There was very little ceremony to the shutdown of Nintendo's first online gaming service for the Wii and Nintendo DS yesterday; any users trying to play some online Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros. since then simply got a message saying the connection can't be made. For those that don't want to give up on playing their legacy Nintendo systems online, though, hackers have developed a way to set up homebrew servers that allow for some online gameplay and DLC downloads for certain titles.

The Nintendo DWC Emulator project started on Github back in March as a Nintendo DS server project, and has since grown to encompass some Wi-Fi functionality for the Wii as well. To use it, players first have to install a software mod on their system using either a ROM patcher and loading cartridge on the DS or an SD card on the Wii. After that, players can set up their system connections to point to a public test server (where a fair bit of game-specific DLC is being made available) or set up their own server by downloading the source code.

Only a handful of the hundreds of Wi-Fi compatible Wii and DS games have been tested as working, but that includes popular titles like Tetris DS, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, and Mario Kart games on both the Wii and DS. Titles with game-specific server code are also missing some functionality like leaderboards, but work is continuing on increasing the compatibility, with 40 commits to the Github repository in the last eight days alone.

For those who want to go even more retro with their online console gameplay, similar homebrew server projects exist for the Dreamcast, Gamecube, PlayStation 2, and original Xbox.