Smash Brawl Blog

Nintendo Wii LAN Adapter // FIXES AND LAG REDUCTION

 
ITS A LONG READ.

Worth it though- i have a lot of problems i faced and solutions.

 
(Although this weekend is full of, and i mean completely full of, new advanced techniques and meta-game discoveries, I have to post this instead because I bought an adapter and set up my router)

 Alright, here’s the scoop:

 1. WiFi, being wireless, is laggy to about a .5 second minimum as far as i can tell. Closeness of the Wii to the router, signal strength, all of that is still limited by the pure fact that you’re not wired to the machine. For anyone who plays PC games, wireless connections can make it just laggy enough to be unplayable, or have lag spikes.

 1a. NO ONE LIKES LAG SPIKES

 2. The Wii LAN adapter changes your trusty old networking cable into USB 2.0, which goes into one of two ports in the back of the Wii. Bypassing wireless and making it an extremely fast connection to the internet increases speed for loading time, joining games, and playing. (sort of- ill get to that later)

 3. From information on Smashboards, Nintendo’s site, and knowledge of how my routers and computers work, you can do several things to speed up the Wii’s wifi speed regardless of whether or not you have a LAN adapter or are using wireless.

 4. THIS IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW: The reason that there is lagginess in RESPONSE TIME for input / output of hitting a button and the character responding is that Nintendo’s servers are delaying BOTH players to the lowest common denominator. That is, in order for the game to function as it is (with both players seeing the same thing at the same time, all the time) the game will slow down to the slowest player’s connection speed.

THEREFORE: as many people as possible should do what I’m about to talk about.

 Note: I can drive to rigapeen’s house in like 3 minutes, he’s not very far away from me. He’s using the Wii’s built-in WiFi capabilities, but even so, when we play there is virtually no lag. The latency of the person who you are playing with can be measured on your Friend Code List, where there is a colored sphere. The more blue, the better the connection to them is. Blue = best, Green = okay, Orange -> Red = Bad -> worse.

 I’ve played with people from the midwest, and theyre orange or green, whereas i got a few more blues and greens from northeasterners near NYC.

 If everyone gets the LAN adapter though, and opens ports, we should all be one big blue (ha, ha) connection.

 THE SOLUTION FOR WIFI BRAWL LAG:

 2 things. 3 maybe.

 1) this is the optional bit:

 Because most people will not be playing with the LAN adapter, there is going to be a minimum amount of lag for matches with one player being wireless. Although i would recommend getting a LAN adapter for the possibilty of playing someone else who has one and a potentially zero-lag game, not everyone is going to want to go pay the 27 dollars (thats with tax) for it.

(side note- some gamestops have them, but Best Buy seems to have the most of them in stock, but it might be a 3rd party device. Mine was, it’s working fine though, i figure they can’t screw up hardware that badly)

 2) A popular GameFAQS post was talking about “Port-Forwarding” for the Wii, in order to let the machine communicate through more points and therefore reduce lag. First, it’s not truly port-forwarding. Instead, it’s just a combination of two things: assigning the Wii a static IP, and opening ports for access to the wii.

 2a) Assign the Wii a static IP on your router. This is vital for both wired and wireless setups. In your router settings (look up how to get to them for whatever router you have- i use linksys) there should be options to choose available IP addresses for use. My router assigns IP addresses to everything that tries to access it in my house- but I had to create static IP’s for my machines that i wanted to have full functionality for online access. Most P2P systems (DC++, BT programs, ETC) will need ports to be open for ‘active’ file exchange, and most games where players can host rooms (i had to do this to host games while playing DotA) need a static IP.

 In some cases, as in mine, there was an issue as to which IP would be available for the Wii. My machines are using 192.168.1.101 -> …104, but then unknown to me, my new printer got assigned an IP, my router took one for itself, and my other network card needed one. (remember, they get handed out per request)
(view your IP info by running command prompt, type ipconfig. You might want to look up other info on this somewhere else, i dont have the room or time to explain everything about networking :P)

 So the workaround for that is to change the assigned IP for the Wii to be about 10 higher than anything you know about, just in case.

(like 192.168.1.114 for mine)

 Then you need to go into the Wii settings menu, bottom right corner on the home screen, and go to page 2 and internet options. Enter all the info you get from your router. This is where “Assign IP automatically” or whatever it says, should be changed to “No” and then you can choose settings. I dunno, find it. It’s there.

DNS settings will be found on your computer, and need to be put in for the wii.

Use the same # for primary and secondary if you dont have a unique secondary DNS.

 
3) (2b) Open the ports for your Wii to access.

 Standard router how-to will explain how to do this:

TCP:

“Allow traffic to all destinations on ports: 28910, 29900, 29901, 29920″

Also, 80 and 443 should be open already. They’re needed.

UDP should be everything open. 

Okay, good, so thats done.

 Uh, this was sort of vague in some bits.

But anyway, start adding everyone and we’ll play, I’m on Wifi Wars

Competitive Open.

tl;dr

LAN adapter = faster brawling