DD-WRT and the Nintendo DSi

I'm a huge fan of DD-WRT. I originally installed it about 3 years ago on a Linksys WRT54G because XBox LIVE stopped working. The only device I've ever had an issue with is the Nintendo DSi. For some reason it could never connect.

Yesterday after some pretty bad storms the router was kind of unresponsive and I had to hard-reset it. While reconfiguring it I decided to do two things:

1.) Change the encryption to WPA2 Personal
2.) Add a virtual wireless host that had WEP for the regular DS games, like Mario Kart

The first goal was easy and much to my surprise the DSi connected to the wireless with no issue, I was able to get online and all that fun stuff.

The second goal, not so much. Unfortunately virtual hosts on my router just won't work no matter which configuration I give it. I can never get the network to actuall be created. I am guessing it's just that I have an old router. The previous version of DD-WRT had the same issue. So no WEP for me.

Now you may be asking "Why would you need WEP if the wireless is working on the DSi with WPA2?" Well, Nintendo, in it's infinte wisdom, implemented the wireless configuration for games with very little assistance from the device's OS. Actually, with almost complete independence. I have yet to find a reason why they would have done that. Almost every device I have ever seen handles the network configurations at the OS's level and then the software just uses what is available. Imagine if you had to set wireless up separately for every browser, anti-virus application, online game, photo manager (Picasa, iPhoto) that used the network? Yeah it's kinda like that.

*sigh*