The second screen experience isn’t just for home consoles anymore. For the past few years, Nvidia has been pushing a second screen experience on the PC with support for tablets and its own Shield handheld device. Now some intrepid hackers have taken one of the very best second screen accessories and brought it to the PC.
At the recent Chaos Communications Congress that took place in Germany, two men presented a live demo of a Wii U Gamepad working on a PC. The two were able to reverse engineer the Wi-Fi signal the Wii U Gamepad uses to communicate with the Wii U and make it communicate with a PC instead. This allows them to build applications for the PC that use the Wii U gamepad as a method of input.
As you might expect, using a Wii U gamepad on the PC has more applications than just for gaming. That doesn’t gaming wasn’t a part of it though. The two men fired up a Gamecube emulator and played the original Gamecube version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker using just the Wii U Gamepad. It’s certainly a pretty big deal, but this current hack is only for the engineers and code junkies among us. Consumers hoping to connect their Wii U Gamepad to a PC will have to wait.
You can watch the full 56 minute presentation below:
If you want to see the slides in more detail, you can see them here. If you want to mess around with some Wii U/PC applications yourself, you can check out the open source documentation here.
[h/t: Engadget] Image via Stan Lawnmower/YouTube